The Birds
There are any number of startling things on display in Cuckoo, the new film from writer-director Tillman Singer, but perhaps the most eyebrow-raising of them all is the realization that this s one of those increasingly rare horror films that arrives in theaters on a huge wave of advanced hype and more or less manages to live up to it. As the film opens, American teen Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is relocating, mostly against her will, to the Bavarian Alps, where her father (Martin Csokas) and stepmother (Jessica Henwick) have been hired to design and build a new resort for odd local bigwig Herr Konig (Dan Stevens, putting the German that he previously deployed in I’m Your Man to new use). Resenting the entire move and wanting to get away from her dad, stepmom and young stepsister Alma (Milla Lieu), Gretchen agrees to take a job working the front desk of the Konig resort where they are staying but it doesn’t take long for her to get the sense that something odd is up—women staying in the bridal suite end up wandering around the gift shop in a daze while vomiting, she begins experiencing deja vu-like sensations and there may or may not be a mysterious woman in a white coat skulking through the nearby forest every night. With her father and stepmother under Konig’s thrall and dismissing her concerns as little more than the latest examples of her acting out, Gretchen begins to investigate matters for herself.
It is around this point that Cuckoo begins to fully live up to its title. As a result, my guess is that one’s ultimate reaction to this film is going to depend to a large extent on how willing they are willing to go with the increasingly strange places they are taken by Singer (whose previous film, Luz, was an equally bizarre and effective genre entry that confined its wild tale of demonic possession to the drab, fluorescent-lit confines of a police station). The tale he spins here is an Argento-like construction consisting of sleek cinematic style, wild narrative swings and plenty of gross out moments and while more rational-minded viewers are likely to find the whole thing to be utterly preposterous, those who aren’t necessarily put off by such things may find themselves sparking to the go-for-baroque approach that he employs here. Beyond that, the film also benefits from the performances from Schafer, whose intensely charismatic turn here confirms that the Euphoria star indeed has the goods to make the leap to the big screen, and Stevens, who is clearly having a scenery-chewing blast playing the supremely weird Konig with barely concealed glee. Again, Cuckoo is not a film for everyone and those unable to find themselves riding its particularly peculiar wavelength may find it all more than a bit silly but for everyone else, it offers up an array of the kind of cinematic thrills, chills and WTF moments that we could all pretty much use right about now.
There was once a time when British director Neil Marshall was looked upon by many as the next big thing in filmmaking on the basis of his early horror cult favorites Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Since then, his output has sloped off quite considerably in terms of quality (and the quality of those initial films was always a bit suspect, to be honest) and now, after such wipeouts as Doomsday and the misbegotten Hellboy remake, it appears that with his latest effort, Duchess, he may finally be scraping the bottom of the barrel with this witless, meandering and punishingly dull stab at a quirky crime thriller that aspires to remind viewers of the early films of Guy Ritchie like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch but which ends up coming much closer in terms of quality to pretty much everything Ritchie has made since. The film stars Charlotte Kirk as Scarlett Monaghan, a glam petty criminal who catches the eye of gangster Robert (Philip Winchester), who sweeps her off her feet and takes her out of her life of drudgery to live with him at his palatial estate in the Canary Islands, equipped with everything from loyal aides (one of whom approvingly dubs her “Duchess”) to a tiger in the basement to dispose of the occasional inconvenient corpse. Alas, Robert is betrayed and murdered by a treacherous colleague (Colin Egglesfield), whose goons also shoot Scarlett in the head and leave her for dead. It doesn’t quite take, however, and before long, she assembles a new gang out of friends, acquaintances and Robert’s two most loyal aides (Sean Pertwee and Hoji Fortuna) to embark on a complex and gruesome revenge plot to get back her late lover’s empire.
Duchess offers viewers the rare opportunity to see a movie in which practically nothing about it works for an instance. The story is a plodding bore (it takes nearly an hour of the film’s running time for the betrayal to occur) that is accentuated by the occasional burst of action (with a shootout in a parking garage serving as the only really effective set piece on display) and way too many cliched affectations for its own good, dialogue that tries to approximate the quirky style of Quentin Tarantino but misses the mark completely and a slew of characters who are nether likable (not necessarily a problem) or interesting (definitely a problem). The film’s biggest problem, however, is the presence of Kirk in the central role in the third and least of her collaborations to date with Marshall (her real-life romantic partner) and if you saw those earlier films, The Reckoning and The Lair, then you have some idea of just how dire she is here. To be fair, she is contending with a sub-standard screenplay (one that she, in fact, co-wrote with Marshall and Simon Farr), but she utterly fails to convey any of the charm, grit or badass determination that everyone else in the story seems to believe she possesses, instead merely striking a series of unconvincing poses in what increasingly feels like a gangster-themed photo shoot from an old issue of Maxim brought (barely) to life. Things briefly spring to life with the arrival of Stephanie Beacham, the one-time horror and soap opera favorite who injects some actual personality to her short turn as a ruthless crime boss. For the most part, however, Duchess is two solid hours of unrelieved and unappealing tedium that should be considered an embarrassment for all concerned.