Producers: Markus Halberschmidt, Josh Rosenbaum, Maria Tsigka, Ken Kao, Thor Bradwell and Ben Rimmer   Director: Tilman Singer Screenplay: Tilman Singer   Cast: Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Márton Csókás, Jan Bluthardt, Mila Lieu, Greta Fernández, Proschat Madani, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Konrad Singer and Kalin Morrow   Distributor: Neon

Grade: C+

Tilman Singer’s darkly comic horror thriller lives up to its title in one respect—it’s absolutely bonkers, with a performance by Dan Stevens as Herr König, a serpentine German mad scientist tooting on a Pied-Piper-like recorder, that represents a master class in chewing the scenery while pretending to underplay.

König has his malevolent eye on Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), an American teen who arrives at König’s resort in the Bavarian Alps with her father Luis (Márton Csókás), his new wife Beth (Jessica Henwick) and her younger half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu); Luis and Beth have been hired to design an addition to the place.  In her more despondent moments Gretchen calls her mother’s answering-machine, begging to come home; the fact that mom never picks up or answers is a pretty clear signal as to why the girl is so down. König also shows an interest in Alma, a mute adolescent given to seizures.

König suggests that Gretchen might fill her free time by assisting Beatrix (Greta Fernández), the resort receptionist, at the front desk, and she agrees, though she prefers riding her bike to and from work rather than agreeing to König’s insistence that he pick her up because the road is perilous after dark.  Gretchen finds that his warning is understandable when she’s stalked by a hooded woman (Kalin Morrow), who pursues her while emitting a screech that sounds like a banshee’s cry as the girl is peddling home.

The injury she receives while trying frantically to get into the family’s modernist home is dismissed by cop Erik (Konrad Singer ), Beatrix’s boyfriend, but leads to Gretchen’s admittance to the clinic run by König’s ally Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), whom he’s introduced as a specialist in chronic disease, where she finds that Alma’s also been brought after a seizure.

Gretchen’s patched up and goes back to work, where strangely friendly, dark-haired guest Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey) is taken aback by something the girl has already noticed–the propensity of others, all females—to throw up while walking the grounds.  When she checks out the next day, she offers to take Gretchen with her, but as they drive along the hooded woman appears and causes them to crash.

Returned to the hospital with serious injuries, Gretchen is again accosted by Henry Landau (Jan Bluthardt), a detective who’d approached her earlier at the resort for help in finding out what happened to his wife there.  He’s instrumental in uncovering what König is up to—a plot that involves multiple close-ups of throbbing larynxes, a swarm of shrieking young women under the control of König’s recorder, and the scientist’s desire to apply the cuckoo’s strange practice of “brood parasitism” to another species, creating what’s referred to as “homo cuculidae.” 

If one tries to make sense of all this, the effort will result in exasperation.  Nor is one likely to find the big finale, in which the hooded woman, who might be someone Gretchen knows, reappears while Landau and König face off against one another and the two sisters bond as they attempt to escape the mayhem, any less confusing.

On the positive side, “Cuckoo” isn’t boring.  On the other hand, it’s as silly as its central conceit.  It does benefit from Stevens’ silkily unnerving performance, and from the commitment Schafer brings to the nervously heroic Gretchen.  And while the rest of the cast merely goes through the motions, Singer’s crew—production designer Dario Mendez Acosta, costumer Frauke Firl and cinematographer Paul Faltz—indulge in some striking visuals, while editors Terel Gibson and Philipp Thomas contribute some creepy if inexplicable touches, like sequences that replay actions in a kind of jagged loop, suggesting a fracturing of time.  A creepy sound design by Jeff Pits, Odin Benitez, Jonas Lux, Steffen Pfauth and Torsten Zumhof, including the weird sounds emitted by the hooded woman and the brood of König’s “guests,” adds to the macabre atmosphere, clashing with the brooding score by Simon Waskow that’s frequently interrupted by the raucous heavy pop that Gretchen listens to over her headphones.

Ultimately “Cuckoo” proves a combination of elements that are more effective individually than as a whole, and by the close it collapses into a farrago that’s neither scary nor funny.  But for genre devotees it has tasty moments along the way.  

Producers: Deidre Backs, Erica Tremblay, Heather Rae, Nina Yang Bongiovi and Tommy Oliver   Director: Erica Tremblay   Screenplay: Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise   Cast: Lily Gladstone, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Shea Whigham, Ryan Begay, Crystle Lightning, Audrey Wasilewski, Lillian Faye Thomas, Blayne Allen, Blake Blair, Trey Munden, Kylie Dirtseller, Cory Hart, Dennis Newman and Hauli Gray   Distributor: Apple+

Grade: C+

Erica Tremblay’s debut feature is the sort of film one would very much like to praise.  Focusing on the harsh realities of life that face Native Americans on reservations (Tremblay’s résumé includes work on “Dark Winds” and “Reservation Dogs,” and she is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation), “Fancy Dance” touches on many real issues of reservation life, especially the dangers facing indigenous women, but in a scattershot fashion that, combined with some lazy writing and flaccid pacing, undermines its power.

The central dynamic involves Jax (Lily Gladstone) and her thirteen-year-old niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson).  Jax is taking care of Roki in a run-down house on the reservation that they share with Roki’s mother Tawi (Hauli Gray), a stripper at a local club who’s disappeared like so many other women.  Whether Jax is a suitable guardian is an open question: she has a criminal record of petty theft and drug-dealing, and Roki is following in her footsteps (as well as, presumably, her mother’s)—in the opening sequence, the two conspire to steal a truck from a guy fishing in the woods. 

But Jax clearly loves Roki, and the girl’s devoted to her.  That’s why a crisis erupts when Child Protective Services begins an investigation into their living arrangement.  In a suspicious coincidence Frank (Shea Whigham), the widowed father of Jax and her sister, shows up with his second wife Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), exuding concern, and shortly afterward the authorities intervene to remove Roki from Jax’s house and place her with them.

Frank and Nancy aren’t terrible guardians, but he seems distant, and while she tries to get close to the girl—obviously unhappy at not having had children of her own—she’s blithely obtuse about the importance of her culture to Roki, which is now centered on her determination to get to the upcoming tribal pow-wow in Montana, an event at which she and Tawi always danced together in their colorful tribal regalia, and where she expects they will reunite.

Desperate, Jax decides to take Roki (and Frank’s car) to the powwow, a move that will shortly result in an Amber Alert identifying Jax as a kidnapper.  The film turns into a road trip with the authorities in pursuit, one marked by several episodes of thievery—(among them of gas at a service station and of a car, a caper that also results in Roki’s acquisition of a gun which, following Chekhov’s law, will have to be used after being introduced).  They also spend a night in an unoccupied house and take a side trip to Tulsa, where Jax seeks the help of Roki’s hostile paternal grandmother Lillie (Lillian Faye Thomas) in tracking down Tawi.

Meanwhile JJ (Ryan Begay), a reservation cop who’s also Jax’s half-brother, is trying to clean up the mess she’s left behind with the federal authorities while she keeps prodding him to ramp up the effort to find Tawi.  She passes along the few scraps of information she’s discovered herself, beginning with the little she learned at the start from Tawi’s fellow dancer Sapphire (Crystle Lightning), who also happens to be Jax’s lover, and then from Ryan (Trey Munden), a lackey of drug kingpin Tanner (Blake Blair), and finally from Lillie’s granddaughter Phaya (Kylie Dirtseller).   In what can only be termed an absurd twist of inspiration, JJ uses them to resolve the missing person mystery with ridiculous ease in the scrap metal junkyard overseen by scruffy Boo (Blayne Allen).

That’s only one turn in the last third of the movie that suggests that Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise realized that they needed to tie together all the narrative threads they’d left dangling quickly if clumsily.  So we get the beginning of Roki’s physical coming-of-age (the whole picture can be seen as her emotional one), interrupted by an intrusion by an ICE Agent (Cory Hart) that closes with a whimper rather than a bang.  And of course there’s a bittersweet finale at the powwow, where Jax fully embraces the meaning she’d earlier explained of “Aunt” in Seneca-Cayuga. (What follows for both of the, though, is left to the viewer’s imagination.)  

It’s admirable that Tremblay has sought to engage so many aspects of reservation life in her film, and sporadically they hit home emotionally.  Overall, however, her skill in juggling them proves uncertain, and Robert Grigsby Wilson’s erratic editing provides little help.  Nor does she offer much assistance to her cast, most of whom appear to have been left to their own devices.  This isn’t a terrible problem for Gladstone, although her performance doesn’t exhibit the subtlety her work for Scorsese did in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” frequently seeming more generalized than nuanced.  Deroy-Olson, however, suffers.  She’s lovely, and handles the less demanding scenes well enough, but in more dramatic moments can be stilted, every amateurish.  And while Whigham can rely on his years of experience, Begay too can come off as a mite clumsy.  The rest of the cast varies from adequate to barely so. 

Shot on location in Oklahoma, the movie has a gritty, natural look, marked by a fairly ascetic production design (Charlotte Royer), costumes (Amy Higdon) and cinematography (Carolina Costa).  Samantha Crain’s score is negligible, but the indigenous material is, of course, evocative. 

“Fancy Dance” has many impressive elements.  A pity they’re not put together more effectively.