Cuckoo’s director hopes young people sneak into his movie and blow their minds
Sam Levinson’s drama series Euphoria has been a spectacular launching pad for new movie stars, with Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and Jacob Elordi all seeing their film careers take off after the show’s first season. Hunter Schafer is the latest Euphoria player heading for film stardom, with her first leading role coming up in Neon’s late-summer horror movie Cuckoo. Schafer plays Gretchen, an American teenager reluctantly joining her father, stepmother, and mute half-sister at a remote German resort run by a deeply creepy man (The Guest’s Dan Stevens) whose excessively friendly front is obviously hiding some deeper motivations.
It’s a dark, strange movie, built around a central character who’s initially hard to like, then impossible not to root for as she takes more and more physical abuse and the odds stack up against her. And given the distinct gap between how the first trailer portrays the film and what’s really going on, Cuckoo is likely to be a significant surprise for a lot of viewers. Avoid spoilers if you can. (You won’t find any below.)
Writer-director Tilman Singer, a German-born filmmaker making his second feature-length project after 2018’s horror-mystery Luz, told Polygon in a pre-release interview that he cast Schafer for the movie years ago, before the first season of Euphoria had even aired. When COVID-19 delayed his production, though, he was gratified to see her building a fan base through the series — because while Cuckoo is an R-rated movie, he’s stealthily hoping that younger teenagers find ways to slip into a theater and see it.
“We had to push [production] one more time because Euphoria was shooting season 2, and by then, it was super hype,” Singer said. “We knew all of that was really, really good for us. It made me happy, because first and foremost, I thought, Wow, she has a lotof young fans, and these young people may go watch our weird movie. I remember when I was a young teenager, the first really weird, strange movies I saw, that kind of
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