Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo

During the off-season, Herr Konig’s mountain resort is like the Overlook without the snow. He is also conspicuously creepy. Nevertheless, Gretchen’s father Luis and step-mom Beth are thrilled to design his expansion, even though it means uprooting her at a time when she is emotionally reeling. The Alpine air will not be therapeutic in director-screenwriter Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, which opens Friday in New York.

Konig oozes sleaze and he has boundary issues, but Luis and Beth are blindly convinced he is good people. They are still awkward around Gretchen, since she used to live with her mother (obviously now deceased). However, they clearly pay more attention to her seven-year-old step-sister Alma, who is mysteriously mute.

Frankly, Gretchen is only too willing to get away from them, accepting a part-time job at the reception desk. However, Herr Konig is bizarrely adamant she must return home before nightfall. Before much time passes, she notices how often female guests suddenly start vomiting after their arrival. Her suspicions were already building, even before a mysterious hooded woman chases her home one night.

Yet, even when Gretchen winds up hospitalized with injuries, Alma still gets more attention for her sudden seizures. She is pretty sure Her Konig is somehow responsible for all the sinister business afoot, which Henry Landau, a disgraced ex-cop (who blames Konig for his wife’s tragic fate) confirms. Although he tries to forge an alliance with Gretchen, she instinctively recognizes he is too unstable to trust.

As a film, Cuckoo is also somewhat inconsistent, but it clicks much more often than it clunks. Dan Stevens is spectacularly sinister and clammy as Herr Konig, far eclipsing his flamboyant horror villains in Abigail and The Guest. Singer also keeps a steady stream of inventive weirdness coming. Did you know cuckoo birds are “brood parasites,” who stash their eggs in other birds’ nests? That turns out to be an important Cliff Clavin factoid that Singer makes much of.

Jan Bluthardt is also entertainingly hardboiled as the ambiguously deranged Landau. However, there is a charisma vacuum at the center of the film, due to Hunter Schafer, whose range starts at moody and ends at morose. Jessica Henwick and Marton Csokas are never really credible as Gretchen’s clueless or complicit parents. Still, young Mila Lieu is quite effective as young, vulnerable Alma.

Regardless, Paul Falitz’s chilly wide-screen cinematography will earn the film justifiable comparisons to The Shining (of course, its not as great). Singer (who previously helmed Luz, an almost experimental horror film that was still scary) masterfully controls the unsettling atmosphere and really cranks up the suspense during the roller-coaster third act. Despite an uneven cast, Cuckoo is satisfyingly frightening enough and sufficiently its own thing to recommend to horror fans, when it opens this Friday (8/9) in theaters, including the AMC Lincoln Square in New York.