Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Cuckoo (2024).
Cuckoo is something that hasn’t really been made before. It’s a twist on both a mad scientist horror movie and a standard Final Girl thriller, one that pits Gretchen (Euphoria star Hunter Schafer), an angsty teenage girl grieving the death of her mother, against a ruthless, self-proclaimed “preservationist” named Herr König (Abigail star Dan Stevens).
For most of Cuckoo‘s runtime, König does his best to hide his nefarious intentions from Gretchen, her father, Luis (Marton Csokas), stepmother, Beth (Jessica Henwick), and half-sister, Alma (Mila Lieu), but he eventually lets the cat (or humanoid bird ladies) out of the bag after he tricks Gretchen and traps her in his home.
The worst vacation ever
While locked in König’s pool house, Gretchen finds herself incapacitated once again by the same shrill, shrieking sound that preceded, among other things, a car crash that nearly killed both her and Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), a seductive tourist she hit it off with earlier in the film. As Gretchen struggles to break free of the time loop caused by the sound, König explains that it is a trill produced by a rare, nearly extinct humanoid species that most closely resembles in its traits and behavior the cuckoo bird. The hooded woman who has been stalking Gretchen and the other female inhabitants of König’s mountain resort is one member of this species, as is the teenage girl who was shown running away from her family’s guest house in Cuckoo‘s opening scene.
That same girl is lured into the same room as the incapacitated Gretchen by a melody that König plays on his recorder. Just before the girl gets too close to Gretchen, König returns, flaunts his power over them both, and begins to suffocate Gretchen with a pillow. He’s interrupted when Henry (Jan Bluthardt), a vengeful former cop whose wife died as a result of König’s experiments, storms into the pool house, shoots König, and then executes the frightened teenage girl that had been lured there just moments earlier. Together, Gretchen and Henry race to König’s nearby hospital in order to save Alma from whatever experiment he and his head physician, Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), are preparing for her.
Check in to this hospital and you may not check out
When they arrive at the hospital, Alma has already been knocked out by a sedative and placed on an operating table, while Luis has been forced to take an increasingly sick Beth back to their resort home. As Gretchen and Henry look into Alma’s room, though, they realize that she isn’t being operated on. Instead, she’s been placed in an observation chamber that will allow her real mother, the hooded bird woman that has terrorized Gretchen throughout the entirety of Cuckoo, to retrieve her. It’s revealed in this same scene that, like some cuckoo birds, the hooded woman’s species relies on brood parasitism to keep itself going. This means that during Beth and Luis’ honeymoon trip to König’s resort years earlier, the former was secretly incapacitated and impregnated with one of the hooded woman’s eggs. Alma is, therefore, another member of the woman’s humanoid, birdlike race.
When Henry realizes this, he wants to kill Alma, but Gretchen wants to protect her. A fight between the two ensues that ends with Gretchen stabbing him in the side with her butterfly knife and trying to take Alma away from him, her mother, and a still-alive, machine gun-wielding König. When Alma misinterprets one of Gretchen’s protective actions as a possible attack on her, though, she pushes her away and gives her angry, inhuman mother the chance to finally kill Gretchen. What follows is a tense standoff in the hospital’s records room that ultimately ends with Gretchen outsmarting her pursuer by muffling her overwhelming screeches with a pair of headphones and killing her by stabbing her in the neck with her knife.
Gretchen subsequently finds herself caught in a standoff between König and Henry, which she tactfully evades just long enough to reach Alma, whom she convinces to trust her again only after finally opening up to her about her mother’s death. Gretchen then tries to protect Alma from any gunshots from either König or Henry. As she walks between the two men, the former tries to persuade Alma to come with him so that he can continue to ensure the future existence of her species, while the latter demands that Gretchen move aside so that he can kill her sister. Alma, however, prevents either she or Gretchen from getting hurt by putting her hands over Gretchen’s ears and letting out one of the same, debilitating screeches that her biological mother often used before one of her attacks.
How does Cuckoo end?
Alma’s quick thinking works. Her trill traps König and Henry in a loop just long enough for her and Gretchen to get away, and the simultaneous gunshots that ring out shortly afterward suggest that the two men killed each other offscreen. As Gretchen then leads Alma into the safety and sunlight of a new day, she crosses paths in the hospital’s parking lot with a still-wounded Ed, who agrees to give the two girls a ride.
Cuckoo then ends with Gretchen cradling a sleeping Alma’s head in her lap — having finally accepted the big sister role that she resisted for so long. Of course, the knowledge that Alma may grow up to become a potentially dangerous, inhuman predator adds a fantastical wrinkle to Cuckoo‘s ending — one that perfectly fits a film as singular and unconventional as it. The thriller is a lot of things: a tense cat-and-mouse game, paranoid mystery, black comedy, and even — in certain instances — a gruesome body-horror experience.
It’s a testament to writer-director Tilman Singer’s tonal control and Schafer’s charismatic lead performance, though, that it ultimately feels as much like an oddball coming-of-age story as it does anything else.
Cuckoo is now playing in theaters.
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