News

"If I were you, I wouldn't get hurt even more..." Neon has unveiled a second official trailer for Cuckoo, the chilling German horror film arriving in theaters soon. It first premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and also played at SXSW earlier this year. Cuckoo is the second feature from German filmmaker Tilman Singer after Luz. Gretchen travels to the German Alps with her father & stepmother, where she comes across dark secrets. She hears strange noises and is plagued by visions of a weird woman chasing after her, drawn into a conspiracy involving bizarre experiments by the resort’s owner that echoes back generations... Following his festival hit Luz, Singer has once again succeeded in creating an atmospheric & visually outstanding horror trip. Shot on 35mm, this film stars Euphoria's Hunter Schafer alongside a brilliant and terrifying Dan Stevens in it. It also features Jessica Henwick, Marton Csókás, Jan Bluthardt,...

"Why did you bring us here?" "Your family belongs here..." Neon has revealed the incredible full trailer for Cuckoo, a freaky horror film coming this summer. It premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and also played at SXSW recently. Cuckoo is the second feature from German filmmaker Tilman Singer after Luz. Gretchen travels to the German Alps with her father & stepmother, where she comes across dark secrets. She hears strange noises and is plagued by visions of a woman chasing after her, drawn into a conspiracy involving bizarre experiments by the resort’s owner that echoes back generations... Following his festival hit Luz, Singer has once again succeeded in creating an atmospheric & visually outstanding horror trip with an original plot and perfidious twists. Shot on 35mm, this stars Euphoria's star Hunter Schafer alongside a brilliant and terrifying Dan Stevens. The full cast also includes Jessica Henwick, Marton Csókás, Jan Bluthardt,...

The first shot after the opening titles of Tilman Singer’s savvily conceived but undercooked Cuckoo is like a reverse angle of the opening shot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Here, a family drives through beautiful but implicitly foreboding mountainous terrain. And we’re located in the cab of the car with Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), an angsty teen who’s been forced to relocate from her home in the U.S. to a relatively remote corner of the Bavarian Alps.

Steep, imposingly snow-capped, and dotted with romantic castles and high-end ski lodges, the Bavarian Alps are tourist magnets, and justifiably so. But this part of Germany was also a favorite of Hitler’s, and today it’s the heart of traditional conservativism in the country. Like Appalachia in the U.S., it’s a place a horror movie might take us to in search of scary people—except here...

Ornithologists will no doubt roll their eyes and scoff, “Who doesn’t know that?” But it was news to me that cuckoos, aside from inspiring those infernal kitsch clocks you want to smash once an hour, are also what’s known as brood parasites. That means they’re either too busy or too lazy or too evil to raise their own young, so they drop their eggs in the nests of other birds and let them do the parenting instead. Respect. German writer-director Tilman Singer folds that fascinating nugget of bird arcana into a reproductive horror scenario that’s more strange than coherent in his second feature, naturally titled Cuckoo.

There’s more than the seed of an entertainingly trippy freakout here, applying the peculiar breeding habits of the cuckoo to the demented plan of a self-described preservationist, bent on somehow or other building an assembly line of enhanced propagation using young “nestlings.