Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Films about haunted hotels (The Shining, Ti West’s The Innkeepers, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter) never lose their appeal, especially when the corridors are deserted: the fewer the guests, the more present the ghosts. Cuckoo, by German writer-director Tilman Singer, is an Alpine variant on this sub-genre. Its mountain-nested establishment feels as remote as Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, but with a modernist antiseptic feel — part Bond villain’s eyrie, part Travelodge.Euphoria graduate Hunter Schafer — recently seen in Kinds of Kindness — crackles with angular angst as grieving teen Gretchen, whose father and stepmother (Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick) have decided to move with her and her young, non-speaking stepsister to a retreat run by one Herr König. He is played by Downton Abbey mainstay Dan Stevens, who has been carving out a curious niche in European genre variations: after playing mischievously mock-suave as a love android in German romcom I’m Your Man, he is differently smooth here, menacingly cordial as the lord of an ever-weirder domain.Gretchen finds a possible ally and love interest — a preposterously glamorous female guest (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, laying it on with a silken trowel). Meanwhile, sinister things keep happening, including sudden nocturnal appearances by a beacon-eyed raincoated wraith, with echoes of Don’t Look Now.This English-language confection comes across as a Bavarian twist on the baroque extremities of the Italian giallo horror school, particularly in the repeated close-ups of a quivering throat, with a matching flicker in the sound and the edit — a simple but unnerving effect embedded in the film’s texture. This is a sumptuously glossy creation, with a weird-science theme that provides the title — although Cuckoo is also of course the aptest name for an entertainment that, while it doesn’t entirely gel, not only embraces its wayward delirium but lovingly hugs it within an inch of its life.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from August 23
