There’s nothing more exciting in a movie than when it feels like anything is on the table. A difficult trick to pull off that’s nearly impossible to sustain throughout an entire feature, the invisible, restrictive guard rails of good storytelling have a way of making dull sense out of the senseless, and not always due to studio interference. Most filmmakers, ranging from the boldly avant-garde to faceless guns for hire, would prefer their narratives to be comprehensible, a tying of knots and tightening of bolts that prevents most flicks from wholly eschewing the beaten path. Despite every Oscar montage and sprawling director interview that would have you believe movies are the stuff that dreams are made of, there’s precious little of that free-associative spiral that ever makes it to the big screen. It’s easy to champion a flick that’s gone off the reservation in concept, but witnessing its execution is a different beast, one with a tendency to try patience and prompt exasperation. Cuckoo should be praised following the beat of its own drum and risking these reactions in the process, but admiration and enjoyment aren’t exactly the same thing.

Set in a Bavarian Alps resort town that’s so inviting as to be menacing, writer/director Tilman Singer’s latest follows Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a recognizably withdrawn teen with more than a few things to be sullen about. Forced to tag along with her father (Marton Csokas) as he builds a new hotel in the area, our heroine spends her days deeply submerged in a pair of bulbous headphones, only taking them off to have stilted interactions with her step-mother (Jessica Henwick) and half-sister (Mila Lieu). This woebegone malaise quickly attracts the eye of Herr König (Dan Stevens), the overseer of the construction project, who gives Gretchen a job at the local tourist shop under the condition that her working hours never extend past nightfall. It’s the kind of stipulation that can’t help but prompt suspicion, but Singer makes sure you’re on guard long before any foreboding deals are struck.

Gretchen isn’t the first young woman we see under duress, as the film begins with a nameless female fleeing an angular home whose other inhabitants are only witnessed in contorted shadow. Opening your movie with an image that somehow mashes European fairy tales, German Expressionism, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave into the same mixing bowl is both a warning to more tentative viewers and a call to arms for those ready to get their freak on. Singer’s ethos is of the more-is-more variety, firing out images and ideas like his movie is a t-shirt cannon at halftime of the big game; everyone on hand is getting new gear, and some fits better than others. While ostensibly functioning as a gooey, jumpy horror flick, the director also finds time for historical recidivism, ecological ruminations, the aspirational ideology of punk rock, and time-looping intrigue that, ironically, is never afforded the requisite minutes to congeal. As a term paper, it’s a mess, but the whole thing feels more like recess anyway, blissfully free of adult supervision.

The above list fails to observe the film’s main theme: women’s bodily autonomy and the myriad ways in which men seem determined to take it away. This has somehow become the topic de jour of 2024’s horror scene, with Immaculate, The First Omen, and The Substance all sharing a similar fascination. The results have been mixed, and while it would be a stretch to call Cuckoo genuinely incisive, it benefits from its distractibility, never staying on the subject (or any subject) long enough to land on an embarrassing, po-faced declaration or denouncement. Perhaps this is faint praise of the damning sort, but it’s hard to begrudge a project that seems so delighted to exist, tirelessly chasing one impulse after the next with infectious enthusiasm. One look at Dan Stevens and you can tell that the delirium is contagious.

Lightyears removed from the stuffy, dripping romance of Downton Abbey and the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, Stevens has been in sicko mode for a while now, preferring stomach-churning, feel-bad fare like The Rental, Apostle, and Abigail for the better part of a decade. Cuckoo serves as his finishing school, and if there was any lingering doubt that the former heartthrob has transformed himself into one of cinema’s finest over-actors, his devilish turn here should put them all to rest. With a cartoonish rictus grin and accent work designed to prompt audible laughter, you never fear his villainy so much as delight in its deliciousness, the sort of go-for-broke performance that would threaten to overwhelm the film if Cuckoo wasn’t similarly set on pushing all its chips to the center of the table. Schafer offers a strong counterbalance, evolving from taciturn introvert into an unlikely final girl while gaining our empathy along the way, but can’t help but feel like a wet blanket next to Stevens’ naughty revelry. Schafer provides the film with soul and structure; Stevens is here to clarify its tone.

The scattershot ideology here is Singer’s own recipe, but the push-pull between jump scares and laugh lines, grotesquery and guffaws, is straight out of the Sam Raimi cookbook. With the oddball auteur subsumed in tentpole fare since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, itself a return to form after years of making Spider-Man flicks, it’s understandable that audiences have lost the taste for Raimi’s particular brand of oil-and-water filmmaking, but those longing for the days of Evil Dead and Army of Darkness should check local listings; their heir apparent has arrived. Cuckoo doesn’t match the heights of those Bruce Campbell vehicles, but it sure does try, which makes it more than a little disheartening when the final act devolves (evolves?) into a down-the-line shoot ‘em up with little imagination and even less style. Singer’s interest in confounding his audience evaporates before our very eyes, but that shouldn’t negate his welcome impulse to do so in the first place.

Long before the cacophonous gunfire signals the end of playtime, there’s a scene of romantic promise where it feels like all bets are off. Is the film we were watching just a bait-and-switch, setting us up for an elaborate mid-movie shake up? Is dream logic the true guiding light here, with further slips into stream-of-consciousness construction soon to come? Can Singer tell this difference, or does he even think that such a line exists? Cuckoo doesn’t ultimately stick the landing, but the divide between success and failure is reductive in the first place. What matters is the aforementioned moment, which, along with several others along the way, has the power to make your imagination take flight, to wonder openly as to what could be around the bend, and not having enough evidence on hand to hazard a guess. Enervating and enlivening in equal measure, Cuckoo might be less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are as enticing as it gets.