In the Flesh: Cuckoo

Now that’s how you make a creature feature. Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is wall to wall hearty genre fare, from the beautifully introduced and fleshed out homo cuculidae, hominid brood parasites who let humans raise their young before coming to reclaim them as adolescence approaches, to the ever more battered and busted-up protagonist, Gretchen (Hunter Schaefer), digging deep to find unexpected reserves of courage and empathy. Singer’s not out to reinvent the wheel, he’s out to make a good-looking ham-and-egger full of modernist brutalism and eerie caricatures of human beings. He succeeds admirably, and the perfection with which he captures the uniquely German weirdness of the setting and its inhabitants is a constant delight. Herr König (Dan Stevens) is a particular highlight, with a vibe somewhere between Nazi eugenicist and overzealous birdwatcher. In a movie so concerned with sound, his prim enunciating gives him the feel of a man with a clear and brittle vision of the world and his place within it. He’s both comical and exhaustingly unfun in the way only German eccentrics can really master.

Schaefer does great work here, too, putting her expressive features and long, lean frame to work as she goes from a slouching, troubled teenager struggling with the death of her mother and her transplantation into her father’s new family to an iron-willed guardian of her new half-sister, Alma (Mila Lieu), whose medical crises conceals a disturbing secret. The scene in which Gretchen painfully unslings her cast to sign with Alma is a wonder of facial acting, with Schaefer walking right up to the line with her trembling lip and shimmering, tearful look. Singer has a lot of faith in his actors, something you’d think directors, as cultivators of images of the professionally beautiful, would be better at in general. The camera lingers on Marton Csokas’ pronounced crows feet with as much interest as it shows for the absolutely lascivious angled close-up of a drugged-out Beth (Jessica Henwick) getting poked and prodded by her husband and her doctor, her bottom lip shining like a ripe cherry, her eyes huge and vacant. It’s like something out of an excellent porno, and I have a lot of time for anyone that interested in the human face.

It’s a choice which also serves to highlight the uncanny nature of the cuckoos, who with their unusual sclerae and pupils and disturbing mouths are only a few standard deviations from normal human beings. The film is admirably scant on details regarding its monsters, dropping just enough clues to make the moments we do see something tangible titillating and exciting. The sight of the adolescent female about to inseminate Schaefer with a handful of cum-like slime produced from who knows where is particularly arresting, conjuring up all sorts of gendered violence and imagery. Cuckoo presents family and procreation as clinical, joyless, and exclusionary, a system tautologically reinforced for its own sake by people with no real interest in the suffering of anyone outside their immediate domestic sphere. Gretchen’s struggle against the cuckoos mirrors her queerness and her rejection of this system, and leads to her ultimate ability to find humanity even in a perverse evolutionary offshoot. Singer’s second flick looks great, sounds great, and hits hard.