Discussions about the differences between film and digital generally boil down to subjective aesthetic preference.

But the 35mm print of Cuckoo interacts with the visual text of the movie in such a way that it fundamentally alters the viewer’s relationship to a major component of the horror.

Celluloid zealots love to talk about the shimmering, flickering look of film…a shimmering flicker (or is it a flickering shimmer?) that looks almost indistinguishable from the screen-shaking visual effect Cuckoo utilizes to signal that something horrifying is about to befall the characters.

So as I was watching the print, I kept having to ask myself, “Is that flickering/shimmering the print…or is something fucked up about to happen in the actual movie??”