Every year or so, there comes a horror film that, for some reason, receives an infectious amount of excitement and hype that I simply do not understand nor believe it deserves.
Examples of such overhyped horror films include Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Adam Wingard’s The Guest, and Oz Perkin’s Longlegs. The reason why I end up feeling this way about a lot of these overmarketed horror films is because the marketing of these movies does not accurately reflect the quality of these films. What is being marketed as “the scariest movie of all time” or “a film that’s scarier than The Exorcist” is oftentimes just a bland and unremarkable horror movie that will be forgotten the same week it’s released. This year, we got two of these overhyped horror films, one of which is Cuckoo.
Now, I should preface that Cuckoo is by no means a bad or poorly made film. If anything, it has a couple of good things going for it. For starters, both Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens give great performances. Schafer does a great job playing both the aimless and sarcastic teenager trying to find meaning in her life when her father (Marton Csokas) and stepmother (Jessica Henwick) clearly don’t care much about her well-being and the final girl horror protagonist attempting to survive the cooky, horror scenario she’s gotten herself into.
Meanwhile, Stevens excellently chews up the scenery as a hammy, over-the-top German horror movie villain and pretty much steals every scene that he’s in. Additionally, the film is decently shot and edited, so there’s nothing I disliked about Cuckoo on a technical level.
However, the main obstacle that really holds this movie back is just how insanely bland and predictable its story is. It’s bad enough that I was able to pretty much predict where the story was going, but it’s an even bigger red flag when I could foresee when the exact cheap jump scares and attempts at horror would be made.
Almost every aspect of Cuckoo has been done before and better in a lot of my favorite campy horror movies, but I should state upfront that a horror movie being predictable is not necessarily a bad thing. If it’s consistently entertaining, somewhat scary, and has some level of self-awareness, then a horror film can be as predictable as it wants.
However, while Cuckoo does lean into the camp a little bit towards the second half once the (very predictable) twist is made, revealing that the scary bird monsters are, in fact, the ones making the eerie sounds, for the most part, the film strangely takes itself very seriously.
The movie is so desperate to create this slow build-up of fear and tension before exploding into a violent, gory third act, but because it fails to excel at either, the end result is something that cannot be described in other words besides boring and predictable. Cuckoo is so desperate to make you care about the relationship between Hunter Schafer’s character and her younger stepsister (Mila Lieu), but because the movie did absolutely nothing to properly develop their bond until the literal last 20-30 minutes of the movie, it’s virtually impossible to care about this.
The film is so insistent on being this bonkers, over-the-top, insane horror fest where it’s both scary and crazy to watch, but because it’s so blandly directed and not much of actual substance is happening, I can’t help but feel disappointed.
Everything about Cuckoo is insufficient and not fun to watch, and had it just embraced being sillier and more over-the-top in the same vein as something like Malignant or The Evil Dead series, then these flaws would add to the fun. In fact, I think if this same concept and script were in the hands of a director like James Wan or Sam Raimi, then there would be so much more fun and personality bursting in every frame. However, as it is right now, this is just another bland, disposable horror that, while I had fun at certain points, I quickly forgot about within the next couple of days.
Rating: 5/10
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