It’s a privilege as a trans woman and a film critic to watch a horror movie starring a trans actress as a queer final girl and not simply applaud. To have seen films like Stress Positions and Lingua Franca and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and Bad Things and Alice Júnior and MonsterDykë and Salacia and Smooth. To have been shown the cinematic possibilities of trans bodies on-screen in stories both explicitly about transness and not. My expectations have been raised, my thirst quenched just enough, to judge a film like Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo on its quality rather than its representation.
And yet despite these films and many others, it is still a big deal to get a mainstream horror movie with someone like Hunter Schafer at its center. There is so much left to explore with trans people and horror, so much to respond to and so much to invent. Alas, Cuckoo does little of that.
But the problem with Cuckoo isn’t that it fails to explore or say anything interesting about its trans protagonist. The problem is it fails to explore or say anything interesting about, well, anything.
Schafer plays Gretchen, a teen girl mourning her mother and reluctantly headed to the German Alps with her father, her stepmother, and her half-sister, Alma who is 8-years-old and mute. They are staying at a resort/research facility/villa owned by the eccentric Herr König (Dan Stevens) while her father and stepmother design a new resort. From the beginning, Gretchen’s distance from her father and resentment of her sister are clear. Her dad has moved onto his second family and her renewed presence is only due to unfortunate circumstance.
Gretchen takes Herr König up on his offer to work reception at the hotel and these sequences are when the film is most successful. Gretchen bonding with her equally bored and angsty coworker, the mystery surrounding why König insists she not work late, a hot Parisian guest who Gretchen is mutually smitten with. A filmmaker with a stronger sense of pace and formal control could’ve extended these sequences and extended the film’s mysteries in this contained environment.
Instead, little tension is left beyond whether or not Gretchen will be able to escape. The question of what is happening at this facility is not compelling enough — or, once revealed, satisfying enough — for the rushed dramatic turns.
Ultimately, the film is about motherhood and fertility. One might think the casting of a trans woman in the lead role would add an interesting element to that exploration. But, hey, if Singer wasn’t interested in incorporating Schafer’s transness, that’s fine. What does the film have to say beyond that? What is it revealing about fertility and motherhood in general? If not transness, 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 could find little to grab onto about any of these haphazardly included topics.
The film is not without its pleasures. There are are some good scares with the repeated technique of characters trapped in a wonderful nightmare dream logic of déjà vu. And Schafer really is a fantastic final girl, leaving me desperate for a filmmaker to give her a role worthy of her talent like Luca Guadagnino finally did for her Euphoria costar. Also Gretchen and the Parisian woman share a brief but very hot make out that was the best pro-smoking ad I’ve seen in years.
It’s just frustrating to see talented actors like Schafer, like Jamie Clayton in the Hellraiser reboot, get these roles that fail to see the potential of casting trans people in horror. It’s even more frustrating that the work — trans actor or no trans actor — is not simply better.
Five years ago, I might have convinced myself Cuckoo was a good movie. I’m grateful for the talented artists — trans and cis — who have made that no longer necessary.
Cuckoo is now playing in theatres.
