Hunter Schafer’s Trades Teenage Melodrama for Survival Tactics in Bloody ‘Cuckoo’ Trailer
In most teen dramas, when a moody 17-year-old is forced to relocate because of divorce or new step-parents, their only real tasks are to slam bedroom doors and worry about building their new social life from scratch. But in the first trailer for Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, the relocation of Hunter Schafer‘s Gretchen is marked by a more sinister mission: outrunning the terrifying beings haunting and hunting her.
“They think I’m crazy,” Gretchen says in the trailer, having been gaslit and dismissed when she told police that she had been chased by a woman. Bloodied and bruised in a hospital bed, a man warns her: “If I were you, I wouldn’t want to get hurt even more.”
The twisted part is that, all things considered, and teenage melodrama aside, this should have been a perfect getaway. She’s living in a resort in the German Alps — albeit with her father and his new family — with stellar views and floor-to-ceiling windows. But its beauty is only surface level.
“Arriving at their future residence, they are greeted by Mr. König, her father’s boss, who takes an inexplicable interest in Gretchen’s mute half-sister Alma,” a synopsis for the film reads. “Something doesn’t seem right in this tranquil vacation paradise. Gretchen is plagued by strange noises and bloody visions until she discovers a shocking secret that also concerns her own family.”
Cuckoo also stars Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Marton Csokas, and Mila Lieu.
“I always kind of get into the spiral of, Am I meant to be doing this?” Schafer recently told British GQ. “I think I could probably keep doing the acting thing for a while, just based on how shit’s been going, which is really cool. But there are so many other things that I want to do with my life that I kind of put on hold and I don’t want to let go of.”
Stevens added: “The mistake people often make is like, Well, you’ve got to choose one. And actually, she doesn’t. I think she can succeed in any direction she decides to go. It doesn’t feel overambitious to say that, because she has the talent to back it up.”