SYNOPSIS: In the unconventional “Cuckoo,” a bonkers new horror film now playing in theatres, “Euphoria’s” Hunter Schafer plays the rebellious 17-year-old Gretchen, a traumatized young woman living with her father Luis (Marton Csokas) and his new family in the German Alps. When her father’s business partner Herr König (“Downton Abbey’s” Dan Stevens) offers her a job on the front desk of his rural mountain resort, she jumps at the chance, despite some red flags. On site, she notices women mysteriously falling ill and when her step-sister becomes sick, Gretchen aims to discover the resort and König’s secrets.
CAST: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens. Written and directed by Tilman Singer.
REVIEW: It’s not the end of the year yet, but I’m willing to bet the aptly named “Cuckoo” will be the strangest arthouse horror film of the year. A mix-and-match of body horror, otherworldly influences and slasher violence, it’s an unpredictable ride courtesy of director’s Tilman Singer’s unbridled imagination.
The off-kilter vibe is supported by the performances. Schafer is the guide, the most earthbound of all the characters, but even she seems engulfed by the film’s sensory overload.
Even more extreme is Stevens, who leaves “Downton Abbey” in the rear-view mirror with a performance so over-the-top it’s like a Bond villain on Adderall. His ever-changing pronunciation of Gretchen’s name is so bizarre, and so entertaining, it’s like it has been filtered through Google translate every time out.
After several mind-bending episodes, “Cuckoo” pays off in the third act as most of the story threads knit themselves up, and plot holes are filled. It will still likely polarize audiences looking for easy answers, but its sheer willingness to embrace its incomprehensibility is part of its eccentric charm.
LOGLINE: “Kinds of Kindness,” a new, absurdist dark comedy now playing in theatres, reteams “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone, in three interconnected stories, detailing the codependency between a man and his eccentric and controlling employer, a policeman whose missing wife reappears, but isn’t the person he remembers and a woman devoted to a spiritual leader.
CAST: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
REVIEW: Director Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the Academy Award winning success of “Poor Things” with another study of the dark side of humanity. The film, “Kinds of Kindness” is a portmanteau, a triptych of tales, each featuring different stories and characters, but the same main cast. Loosely connected, each section deals with some sort of manipulation and falling under the sway of someone who may, or may not, have the best of intentions.
Those expecting a rehash of “Poor Things” or “The Favourite,” the Lanthimos films that edged the Greek director into the mainstream, will have to adjust expectations. This is a return to the, despite the movie’s title, unkind tone of earlier works like “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” The harder edge brings with it a certain kind of bleak, mean spiritedness that may be entertaining to watch, but not always exactly enjoyable to process as a viewer.
Still, Lanthimos has made a movie that is not soon forgotten.
In a landscape of movies that offer instant gratification, “Kinds of Kindness,” with its unexpected twists and often unpleasant story developments, is one that takes its time to burrow into its audience’s collective consciousness.
To say it takes some surprising zig zags is an understatement, but it’s not simply strange for the sake of being strange. There does seem to be a motive behind the madness of this co-dependency comedy, no matter how impenetrable it may be. Your enjoyment level will depend on your ability to hang on to the mast as the waters get very choppy.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” is an origin story, because what good is a franchise if it doesn’t splinter off in an origin story or two? The prequel set 64 years before the events of the successful Jennifer Lawrence franchise, is a big and bold movie about the future ruler of Panem that feels as though it may have worked better as a miniseries.
The new film centers on Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), scion of the once powerful Snow family.
Orphaned during a civil war that divided the nation of Panem into a wealthy Capitol city, where everyone seems to dress like the keyboard player of Spandau Ballet circa 1983, surrounded by twelve poverty-stricken Rocky Mountain districts, where everyone speaks like a Dolly Parton impersonator.
Coriolanus is living hand-to-mouth with his grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) and cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer), trying hard to keep up appearances at his fancy school, and hoping to win an academic scholarship. “Look at you,” says Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), Academy dean and creator of the Hunger Games. “Your makeshift shirt and your too tight shoes, trying desperately to fit in, when I know you Snows don’t have a pot to piss in.”
Despite his hardships, A-student Coriolanus is a shoo-in to win the scholarship until Highbottom announces that the bursary will no longer be award for grades. As part of the upcoming Hunger Games, a televised gladiatorial death-match that pits kids, or “tributes,” from the districts against one another, Coriolanus will have to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a tribute from the impoverished District 12, given to bursting into rebel showtunes. If she survives the game under his leadership, he’ll get his scholarship and an entrée into the life of his dreams.
What begins as a battle for life and death, becomes a larger story of good vs. evil, of love and destiny, of opportunity and choice.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is a big handsome movie with a lot on its mind. Fans of the series will know that Snow goes on to become a villain, an autocratic ruler with a sadistic side. This is how he got there, from outcast to insider, from protagonist to antagonist. The detailed descent into evil is born from his instinct for self-preservation that overrides whatever righteousness once resided in his soul.
Fans may enjoy the trip back top Panem, but “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” has a different feel from the originals. The first set of films were very much about Katniss Everdeen’s (who does not appear here) decency as a galvanizing symbol of rebellion against oppression.
This is the anti-hero’s journey, and, as such, it’s darker and not as action packed.
It’s a character study, divided into three sections and stretched to an over-long two-hours-and-forty-minutes. Each episode covers an aspect of the story, but, particularly as we get to the last section, the storytelling feels disjointed, rushed, as if there is too much story for one movie. The world building is interesting, and Blyth is suitably icy, but as we’re ushered through the episodic tale, it feels as if this could have used a different approach to fully flesh out the story. A mini-series might allow the time the story needs to feel fully realized.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is a different beast than its predecessors. Lucy Gray’s musical numbers—it sometimes feels like “Hunger Games” done by theatre kids—add a new dimension, and the tone is different, but it is the study of the banality of evil that really sets it apart from what came before.
