The Cuckoo’s Curse 2023

A young white-collar Spanish couple, architect Marc and obstetrician Anna, arrange to swap houses with a pair of amiable older Germans, Hans and Olga, who live in Freiburg, so they can spend a few days in the Schwarzwald ahead of the birth of their first baby. The plan is simple and hopeful: a temporary exchange that promises a relaxing getaway before a major life change.

On arrival in Germany, [Hans] presents [Marc] with a hint of an ongoing liaison back in Spain involving Anna, casting a shadow over the trip and planting doubt about the paternity of the forthcoming child. This suspicion triggers a jarring accident when [Marc] crashes [Hans]’s Maserati GT and badly sprains his leg, prompting him to tell [Anna] in a taciturn, almost ceremonial tone that he will return to Spain the next day. Yet by the next morning, he regains a buoyant, almost unnaturally upbeat mood, as if the crisis had rewritten his temperament overnight.

Strange occurrences begin to accumulate. A middle-aged woman, unfamiliar to [Anna], is found trying to operate the taps in Hans and Olga’s house. When she notices Anna’s pregnancy, she warns that Anna must leave the house immediately or she will be “next.” The language barrier keeps Anna from fully grasping the danger, but a later police contact and ambulance involvement confirm that the woman is a dangerous escapee with Capgras syndrome, adding a chilling layer to the already unsettled atmosphere. That night, after attending the Fastnacht carnival, Anna experiences a vertigo and wakes later with no memory of part of the evening. She also notices a striking detail: a Fehu rune ⟨ᚠ⟩ tattooed on [Marc]’s back, which he interprets as “Freyja” and a symbol of rebirth.

Meanwhile, back in their Spanish apartment, Olga and Hans inhabit the space in a trance of ritual, wearing loose robes and repeating incantations. When Anna regains consciousness, she discovers the same rune tattoo on her own shoulder, a mark she and [Marc] now share as proof of their supposed renewal. [Marc]’s behavior shifts again—he becomes methodical, precise, and begins to speak German, a language he did not know before this trip. The couple’s growing paranoia is compounded when Anna uncovers a hidden room in the house that contains photographs of Olga and Hans. The pictures reveal a height discrepancy and show the same mysterious woman from before, suggesting a complicated, blurred line between the two households.

Driven by a need to escape, Anna tries to flee to the airport in a taxi, but is halted by [Marc], who seems to have inverted his role in the relationship and now acts to restrain her. Their conflict escalates to a brutal moment in the bathtub, where Anna nearly drowns, only to awaken with a new sense of connection to [Marc] and to begin communicating in German as he does. The inversion of power between the two couples becomes a central thread as Olga’s influence takes hold in the Spanish apartment as well.

The tension crescendos when Olga’s mind appears to return to normal in a terrifying moment of peril: she traps [Marc] in the cellar and orchestrates an accelerated childbirth using oxytocin, delivering the baby with a disturbing mix of tenderness and control. Anna, who had offered to return her body to exchange for the baby’s blood, is drawn into the chaos, and Olga fatally wounds [Marc] with scissors in a skirmish that leaves both women scarred physically and emotionally. In a final act of shocking violence, Olga bludgeons Anna with a blender, muttering in Spanish, “I never liked my nose.” She carefully wraps the newborn and speaks to it with a twisted tenderness, “I love you,” before slipping away as the police close in.

Throughout, the narrative threads between languages, rituals, and the fragile boundary between trust and fear blur the sense of safety for both couples. What begins as a routine house swap for a peaceful holiday becomes a chilling exploration of identity, loyalty, and the unsettling ways in which couples can become entangled in a silent, creeping threat. The story ends not with a quiet reunion, but with a haunting tableau of renewal and loss, as two families’ lives collide in a Brazil of emotion, memory, and the inexorable pull of destiny.