Movie Review : Cuck (2019)

A film based on true events marks the end of a cultural cycle. It means that we’re collectively ready to empathize with shit that once terrified and divided us. The emergence of the alt-right wasn’t a “thing” in contemporary culture until Donald Trump announced he ran for president in 2015 and we’re arguably still in the middle of it. So, perhaps we aren’t ready yet for a movie on alt-right radicalization. We sure weren’t ready for the grotesque, lurid and judgmental Cuck, a film that adds absolutely nothing what you can already find on an angry internet comment section.

Cuck tells the story of Ronnie (Zachary Ray Sherman), an unstable loner who looks like Red Letter Media’s Rich Evans’ little brother. He lives with his mother (Sally Kirkland) and can’t hold a job. He’s also been to prison for an undisclosed crime, because he’s on parole at the start of the movie. Rejected by employers and women, Ronnie turns to his laptop and starts uploading vlogs on YouTube, which become popular with other losers like him. He soon finds an audience for his misogynist and increasingly violent ranting, which drives him to become even more extreme.

Alright, Cuck is not a movie about alt-right radicalization. It’s not interested in understanding the nuances in anything. Ronnie doesn’t self-radicalize throughout the movie. He was never “normal” to begin with. He checks every box of the classic movie sociopath: lives with his mother, can’t hold a job, can’t get laid, adopts a victimizing attitude, blah, blah. Ronnie’s a boring, stereotypical character right from the get-go. Except that in Cuck, he’s the protagonist and not the unstable-weirdo-who-someone-has-to-stop-before-he-kidnaps-the-girl or something.

Wait… he’s technically both? Ugh.

Ronnie’s only redeeming quality is his romanticizing of his late father’s military career. He wears his old man’s uniform, salutes in his bedroom mirror, shows boundless admiration for veterans, details like that. Cuck would’ve been more pertinent if it explored that idealized relationship and portrayed on how one generation’s nationalism informed the other. Better yet, it could’ve been about Chance Dalmain (Travis Hammer), an even more successful alt-right vlogger with an origin story that didn’t seem as self-evident as Ronnie’s. It’s not difficult to think of something smarter.

Something else I absolutely loathed: the porn star love interest subplot. I know exactly why it was in the movie: co-writer and director Rob Lambert wanted a woman to turn Ronnie into a literal cuckold, because that’s what he keeps calling everybody who disagrees with him: “cuck”. There’s no underlying irony here because Ronnie is conveniently unaware that playing the cuckolded husband in online porn videos is ironic. Candy (Monique Parent) and her skinhead husband (Timothy Murphy) come off like heartless hustlers, who… kind of victimize Ronnie?

Candy was the one clever twist Cuck had up its sleeve and eventually she came off like an incel’s warped vision of womanhood: neurotic, deceitful and plotting.

I have yet to confirm this, but certain sources claim that Cuck made 0$ in its limited theater run. I can see three reasons that explains such a failure: 1) Coming out the same day at Joker. 2) Having more or less the same plot as Joker, except that the protagonist is ugly and irresponsible instead of being mentally ill and 3) Offering zero interesting or bold perspective whatsoever on the emergence of the alt-right, incel culture and online radicalization or the society that engineered them. Cuck is a barren, artless and self-serious waste of time. It’s not even worth a hate watch.

0.6/10