Cuckoo

⭐ 7/10

This movie is a whack movie. At its core it is about conservation which is.... a little gross in the context of the film. I'll be real I'm not entirely sure what to think about what's going on here because its just so odd. 

This movie takes place in the beautiful German Alps at a Neo-retro European ski resort. This movie follows the eldest daughter of a family of 4 named Gretchen. Gretchen is a complicated teenage girl dealing with a slew of things. The loss of her mom, the remarriage of her dad, reintegrating into a family dynamic with a new mother figure and a new step sister, and relocation to a different country in a different continent. These challenges alone make for a difficult circumstance, but integrating into this new beautiful environment becomes harder than expected when we meet Herr König, the owner of the ski resort Gretchen and her family are working on expanding. As her architect father and König are working during the day, Gretchen hides in her room playing the bass guitar and scrolling her phone. This prompts König to offer her a job at the resort. It's through this job that Gretchen starts seeing some weird stuff. Young girls constantly coming into the lobby dehydrated, disoriented, throwing up clear fluids, a whole lot of weird stuff. This culminates into an incredibly creepy (and very well filmed encounter) with a creature who appears to be a woman, but with more veins, and enhanced abilities. After this encounter, Gretchen teams up with a private detective to find out what is really going on in the resort (specifically, what is going on in the honeymoon sweet). After discovering what the resort is for, who König really is, and a whole new humanoid species of creature, we learn what "conservation" really means in the context of the film.

There are some really good things and some kind of boring things about this movie. For starters, the movie is extraordinarily pretty. This is mostly due to the location, but the cinematography of this movie is very good. There are some stellar shots that are creepy, well framed, and most importantly to me, unique. This brings me to my next thing that I like, this movie is super fresh and unique. Horror tropes are hard to break, the horror genre is super hard to NOT fall into stereotypes with, this movie somehow manages to avoid most of these and deliver an extremely interesting and fresh story to the screen.

There are other things to like about this too but nothing that outweighs my only criticism of this movie, it's kind of boring sometimes. There are some corny and weird interactions and scenes in this movie that are meant to raise the tension of the film but end up weirdly doing the opposite. The most prominent of these scenes is a very awkward gunplay scene where 2 characters get into a shoot out approximately 20 feet from one another and neither of them seems to be able to hit each other... ever. They're so inept with guns in fact that another character is able to casually walk in the room with minimal effort put into finding cover, and makes it through unscathed. This is just an example of an awkward scene that is meant to heighten the tension but ends up doing the opposite.

All in all there are more good things with this movie than bad things and I would recommend this movie for anyone who is into the horror genre. Good shots, decent scares, and a solid twist near the end make for a pretty well rounded film.