In Lee Edelman’s 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the American academic and literary critic characterizes queerness as anti-family and anti-reproduction. Gays who are settling down, wanting a family and reproducing heteronormative structures are not, in Edelman’s vision, living a “properly” queer life. What is queer, instead, he thinks, is a commitment to the present and an all-out rejection of the future as the key driver of existence.
When Edelman was writing, he likely wasn’t imagining Hunter Schafer, playing a 17-year-old lesbian grieving her mother’s death, and wielding a switchblade to overcome a crazy resort owner with a German accent in the Bavarian Alps. And yet, in Cuckoo, a new film by the German director Tilman Singer starring Schafer, captures the ethos of Edelman’s thinking perfectly through her character. Cuckoo is more than just a thrilling scary movie: it’s a film that grapples with the horror of compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction.
At the start of the film we’re introduced to Gretchen (Schafer), whose mother has recently died. We learn quickly that she has to move from the U.S. to a resort in the Bavarian Alps called Resort Alpschatten, where her dad is starting a new job. Gretchen’s stepmom, Beth, who doesn’t appear to like her, and her stepsister, Alma, who Gretchen frequently reminds other characters is “not my sister,” are also forced to come together to make a new blended family. As the film opens, the family arrive at Alpschatten, which has the feel of a mid-century chalet. The resort is surrounded by a dense forest—you can hear the birds in the trees but you can’t see them. Inside the lobby there’s an old landline that rings loudly. A doctor arrives on a yellow buggy that seems like it was pulled straight from Jurassic Park. The bathroom is painted in a 1980s teal green. Despite these anachronisms, the film is set in the present—or at least in the age of smartphones. The aesthetic nostalgia of Cuckoo adds an eeriness that matches how one might feel entering an old resort in the Bavarian Alps (in that the failure to be absorbed by, or the ability to withstand, rampant development under capitalism can feel almost sinister. What must they be doing to be staying in the past?).
Once they arrive at Alpschatten, the family is greeted by Herr König (Dan Stevens) who owns the resort, and makes a strained joke about how Alma was conceived. Immediately, the film’s preoccupation with reproduction becomes clear.
König offers Gretchen a job as a receptionist at the resort, and despite her initial misgivings about him, she accepts. At work, though, she soon notices that something is amiss: guests frequently wander in in a daze before becoming violently ill.
From there, things quickly start to take a supernatural turn, as eeriness gives way to bloody, messy horror. In the medieval tale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin lured the children away with his magic pipe. König also has a pipe that he plays in the film. But instead of a line of children, his flute seems to summon a possessed woman who appears suddenly out of the woods. She doesn’t speak—rather, she squawks, and the big, round sunglasses she perpetually wears, even after dark, make her eyes resemble those of the cuckoo. The first night that she appears, early into the film, she chases after Gretchen, who only escapes by throwing herself into the nearby hospital. Gretchen, scared for her life, tries to explain the ordeal to her family, the police and the resort staff—but none of them believe her.
Gretchen has terrible posture. Schafer masterfully performs the embodied anxieties of a miserable teen, carrying herself with the weight of a repressed puberty. Her head tilts forward, her shoulders follow, holding tension, strained. She trips on her feet, pulls at her bomber jacket. Gretchen’s alienation from her family grows: she scrunches her face, her eyes and looks perpetually unimpressed. She listens to music loudly with headphones on. We learn that Gretchen carries a lot of grief: she likes to call her dead mom’s answering machine to hear her mom’s voice, leaving messages like, “I know this is weird, but it’s good to hear your voice.”
The film does have moments of levity, and they often coincide with queerness. Alone at the hotel desk one evening, Gretchen meets an intriguing new guest: a young woman named Ed shows up wearing a leather jacket, a red jumpsuit and round John Lennon sunglasses. She’s on her way to Paris but is looking for a room for the night. Ed clasps Gretchen’s hand and tells her, “You look like you don’t belong here, Gretchen.” There’s a palpable tension between the two; Gretchen, more shy, her body almost concave behind the desk; Ed, more forward, leaning toward Gretchen: both, clearly, into the other. They’re interrupted and the moment passes.
The next time we see Ed, the pair kisses up against a tree at the resort, holding cigarettes. They make plans to leave the Alps together, but their escape is foiled by another supernatural event that Gretchen can’t quite explain—or convince her family to believe in.
Meanwhile, at home, things continue to deteriorate for Gretchen. Her parents don’t trust her and she doesn’t trust them. Her stepsister begins to have seizures, which doctors suggest could be caused by stress. The doctors and König—who seems to perpetually be lingering around Gretchen’s family—are very interested in Alma. At the hospital after a particularly bad seizure, Alma’s doctors ask her parents whether there have been any dramatic changes to her life that would result in excess stress—and everyone turns to look at Gretchen. The implication is that Gretchen is the nuisance. She is getting in the way of the nuclear family that is building a new life, and a new future in Bavaria. She is trouble.
Gretchen keeps causing trouble. The energy of the film shifts in the middle from horror to a whodunit as Gretchen becomes determined to figure out what is going on: who is the strange, squawking woman? Why is König always hanging around, and why are all the town’s adults seemingly preoccupied with her stepsister? Here, the film loses itself in its change in register. The action and horror drives the film, and when it wends into intrigue and Gretchen-as-detective, it becomes less engaging. It felt like Singer was trying too hard, in the film’s middle section, to explain, or attempt to explain, the plot of the film to viewers.
“Singer captures the in-the-way-ness that many queer people feel growing up around their family.”
As Gretchen gets closer to the truth, she threatens to unmask the sinister plan that König and other residents have lured her unsuspecting family into. She becomes more than a nuisance. Much like Edelman’s queers, Gretchen, in this horror film, is a destructive, anti-future influence. She hates her new family. She gives her stepsister seizures and she wants to destroy König’s plans. Gretchen is getting in the way and trying to stop the terror, as it were, of domestic, heteronormative life.
Singer captures the in-the-way-ness that many queer people feel growing up around their family. They are making things difficult by wanting to be different, by looking different, by asking for a different life. They are a nuisance and, Edelman would say, that friction is in part because they want the future to stop. Gretchen wants it to stop too. She wants to go back home to her friends and to her life with her mom.
The film, overall, is thoughtful and ambitious in the themes that it wants to develop. But it does so with the lightness of a slightly deranged mad-scientist-against-gay-teen plot. What is most moving about Cuckoo lies in its redemptive edge. Singer’s film is absorbing cinema both in its thrill and blood, and in its Gretchen-against-the-world logic. And in her quest to beat the bad guys, Gretchen develops a pliable softness toward Alma, whom she wants to keep safe from the scary forest woman, and weird medical staff and resort owner. Schafer’s performance is mesmerizing: at times tender, at times sullen and fed up, she ties together the warmth and anger that lies at the heart of Singer’s universe. Despite Gretchen’s dad and stepmom and everyone at the resort portraying Gretchen as cold and annoying, her emo puberty facade falls away by the film’s end, and reveals someone who is loving and caring, in spite of her anti-family, anti-future drive. Singer leaves us, in Cuckoo, with a pulverized sense of hope about building a queer life.
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