CUCKOO Is a Messy B-Movie Metaphor for Autism

It doesn’t make much sense…though not in a bad way.

Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is an incoherent B-movie genre exercise that is more or less intentionally about the way that disability renders typical genre narrative tropes incoherent and incomprehensible. If you ever wanted to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers liquefy into a vague, indistinct metaphor for autism, this is the (very strange) film for you.

To the extent you can piece together a plot here, the film starts with 17-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) accompanying her father, step-mother, and mute step-sister to a resort town in the Bavarian Alps. Gretchen’s mother has just died, and she is grieving, angry, and alienated from her family.

Creepily solicitous resort owner Herr König (Dan Stevens) offers Gretchen a job watching the front desk of his hotel. While coming home one night she is attacked by a hooded woman (Kalin Morrow).

And this is where things start to come apart. The hooded woman is, it turns out, a humanoid cuckoo of uncertain origin; her screams disorient human victims, allowing her to vomit fluid into their mouths and implant an egg. König is a humanoid cukoo preservationist, and helped the hooded woman implant an egg in Gretchen’s mother Beth (Jessica Henwick) when she was on her honeymoon. So Gretchen’s sister Alma (Mila Lieu), is not human (explaining her voicelessness).

Oh right, and somewhere in there we meet Henry (Jan Bluthardt) an ex-cop whose wife was accidentally killed in an implantation process, and who is trying to kill all cuckoos.

If that all sounds improbable and meandering—well, the movie itself is even less sensical than the summary. What created the cuckoos? How does the impregnation work? Why is the hooded woman wearing sunglasses? How does Henry escape certain death? How does König escape certain death? Does all the exposition about why Alma needs to be reunited with her cuckoo mother actually clarify anything? (No, it doesn’t.)

This farrago of plot holes and plot dead ends isn’t that unusual in B-movie-esque horror. What’s less standard, though, is the way that the cuckoo’s cries recapitulates, parodies, and/or thematizes the narrative chaff.

When the hooded woman screams, the disorientation is visualized as a kind of plot stutter; Gretchen sees herself going through a door and then discovers she has instead run into the locked door. She takes a cigarette from romantic interest Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), and then takes the cigarette again, and again. She tries to grab a makeshift weapon to fight the against being impregnated, and then she’s back trying to grab a makeshift weapon, and over and over again. The cuckoo call tears apart the progress of the film. Which was not making much progress anyway.

That call is also, simultaneously, a metaphor for disability in general, and for autism more specifically. Alma, a cuckoo, is, again, nonverbal; she can communicate in sign language and can type words, but she can’t speak. Her parents are normal (neurotypical) humans, but they have been implanted with this neurodivergent aberration, which some (like Henry) see as a monster to be destroyed, and others (like König) see as a scientific curiosity to be studied, manipulated, and condescended to.

In that context, the film’s inability to cohere—especially at the moments when the cuckoo calls—turn B-movie incompetence into a statement about failed communication. And perhaps into a metaphor for the way that horror movie narratives are built on an unexpressed (and unexpressible?) loathing of disability at the same time as they use disability—mental illness, distorted bodies—as a validating aesthetic.

It seems important here that Gretchen herself spends most of the film with her arm immobilized and her head swathed in bandages after a (cuckoo-caused) car accident. She looks more like a horror movie monster than the cuckoo in a lot of ways. Her outward disarray is a parallel for her inward grief. But it also brings her closer to her mute sister. They are both not working correctly; they both end up in the hospital, poked and prodded as they are nursed (at least aspirationally) towards normality.

The emotional climax of the film is arguably the moment when bandaged Gretchen hears a type-to-speech message from Alma left on the answering machine of Gretchen’s dead mother. Alma, who doesn’t understand that Gretchen’s mother has passed away, talks about how much Gretchen misses her, and asks her to come visit. I

This is a miscommunication; Alma doesn’t understand death, or logistics, because she’s young, and (perhaps) because she’s autistic. Alma’s computer voice speaks to the non-human answering machine, nobody speaking to nobody, empty voices missing each other in the void.

But also, the miscommunication is in fact communicating the most important thing, which is love to a broken sister from a broken sister. And if they love, and are broken together, maybe they (and the mess of a movie) aren’t really broken at all.