It is a privilege, as a trans woman and film critic, to watch a horror film with a trans actress as the queer final girl and not simply applaud. Films like Stress positions And Lingua Franca And We all go to the World Exhibition And Bad things And Alice Junior And MonsterDyke And Salacia And Smooth. To see the cinematic possibilities of transsexual bodies shown on screen in stories that explicitly deal with transsexuality and not. My expectations were raised, my thirst was quenched just enough to judge a film like Tilman Singer’s. cuckoo on the quality and not on the presentation.
And despite these and many other films, Is It’s still a big deal to make a mainstream horror film with someone like Hunter Schafer at the center. There’s still so much to explore when it comes to transgender and horror, so much to respond to and so much to invent. Unfortunately cuckoo does little of it.
But the problem with cuckoo is not that it doesn’t learn or say anything interesting about its transsexual protagonist. The problem is that it doesn’t learn or say anything interesting about, well, anything.
Schafer plays Gretchen, a young girl grieving for her mother who reluctantly sets off for the German Alps with her father, stepmother and half-sister Alma, who is 8 and mute. They stay at a resort/research facility/mansion owned by the eccentric Mr. Koenig (Dan Stevens) while her father and stepmother design a new resort. Gretchen’s distance from her father and resentment toward her sister are clear from the start. Her father has moved on to his second family and her renewed presence is due to unfortunate circumstances.
Gretchen accepts Mr. König’s offer to work at the hotel’s front desk, and these sequences are the film’s most successful. Gretchen befriends her equally bored and anxious colleague, the mystery of why König insists she doesn’t work late, a hot Parisian guest who Gretchen also has a crush on. A filmmaker with a stronger sense of pacing and formal control could have expanded these sequences, building up the film’s mysteries in this limited setting.
Instead, there’s little suspense left beyond whether or not Gretchen can escape. The question of what’s going on inside this facility isn’t compelling enough – or, once revealed, satisfying enough – for the rushed dramatic twists.
Ultimately, the film is about motherhood and fertility. You’d think that casting a trans woman in the lead role would add an interesting element to that exploration. But hey, if Singer had no interest in incorporating Schafer’s transsexuality, that’s fine. What does the film have to say beyond that? What does it reveal about fertility and motherhood in general? If not transsexuality, what does the film want to explore in terms of disability and race, grief and family? Despite self-serious monologues and overly complicated plot details, I couldn’t find anything to grip me on any of these randomly included topics.
The film is not without its pleasures. There are some good scares with the repeated technique of the characters caught in a wonderful nightmare-dream logic of déjà vu. And Schafer really is a fantastic final girl and I desperately hope a filmmaker gives her a role worthy of her talent like Luca Guadagnino finally did for her. euphoria co-star. Also, Gretchen and the Parisian girl share a brief but very heated smooch, and that was the best pro-smoking ad I’ve seen in years.
It is simply frustrating to see talented actors like Schafer, like Jamie Clayton in the Hellraiser reboot, get these roles that don’t recognize the potential of casting transgender people in horror films. Even more frustrating is that the work – with or without transgender actors – isn’t simply better.
Five years ago I might have convinced myself cuckoo was a good film. I’m grateful to the talented artists – trans and cis artists – who made that unnecessary.
cuckoo is now in cinemas.
