Cuckoo’s Ending, Explained

In CuckooHunter Schafer, best known for her role as Jules Vaughn in Euphoria, plays Gretchen, an American teenager forced to move to a resort in the German Alps with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), her stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) and her daughter change. her half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu) after her mother’s death. The film had its world premiere at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2024, and was released in the United States on August 9, 2024. Reviews have been generally positive, with particular attention to the performances of Schafer and Dan Stevens.

The film was written and directed by German filmmaker Tilman Singer. Cuckoo is Tilman’s second film. His first, light (not to be confused with The owl house character of the same name), released in 2018. light was Tilman’s thesis film project. Variety described it as “an enterprise of modest scale but skillful and conceptually bold.” [that] draws attention.” The same could be said of Tilman’s second feature film.

What is the cuckoo about?

Shortly after her arrival, Gretchen is disturbed by strange events happening at the resort. Alma is having seizures, women are vomiting in the resort lobby, and, worst of all, Gretchen is being chased by The Hooded Woman, whose creepy behavior is made even creepier by her red eyes. The longer Gretchen stays at the resort, the more scared she becomes, and she is especially suspicious of Mr. König (Dan Stevens), the resort owner who invited her family to stay in the first place. After a horrific car accident that injures Gretchen and her love interest Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), Gretchen teams up with Henry (Jan Bluthardt), a former detective, who suspects that the hooded woman pursuing Jules has committed at least a murder and just things like that. get weirder from there.

Gretchen and Henry stake out one of the resort’s cabins, The Lover’s Nest, where they see The Hooded Woman attack Gretchen’s co-worker Trixie (Greta Fernandez) and then attempt to implant some kind of mysterious slime on her. Gretchen tries to confront König in front of her family, but they dismiss her as a nuisance, especially since Alma is hospitalized. Later, König tells Gretchen that he will leave her at a train station so she can escape from him, but instead he traps her in her own house. This is where the film takes a decided turn. König reveals that The Hooded Woman is part of a humanoid species that depends on brood parasitism or the implantation of her eggs into a surrogate mother. (This is a similar practice to the titular cuckoo bird, although it obviously involves eggs in nests, rather than silt.) When the child comes of age, the mother will return to claim her child and continue raising him as her own. König tries to get another humanoid to impregnate Gretchen, using a flute to hypnotize her. Fortunately, Henry arrives and saves Gretchen. Together, the two race to the hospital to find Alma.

How does it work? Cuckoo End?

It turns out that Alma is actually the Hooded Woman’s daughter. The Hooded Woman implanted it in Beth while Beth and Luis were staying at the resort on their honeymoon. This explains why Alma cannot speak. Like the rest of her species, she is only capable of making disorienting, looping screeches. König and his accomplice, Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), are determined to reunite Alma with her “real” mother, so that The Hooded Woman can raise Alma as part of her species. Both Gretchen and Henry want to put an end to this, but unfortunately, it becomes clear to Gretchen that not only does she intend to kill The Hooded Woman, but Alma as well. Gretchen tries to protect Alma, but Alma misunderstands Gretchen’s intentions and flees. In a confrontation in a library, Gretchen fatally stabs The Hooded Woman and eventually reconnects with Alma to tell her that she would never hurt her. The two then come up with a plan to escape from Henry and König.

At its core, Cuckoo is about brotherhood

Cuckoo asks a lot of its audience in terms of suspension of disbelief, but the emotional core of the film is solid. At first, Gretchen is quick to dismiss Alma as her sister because Alma is Luis’s daughter from a new marriage and she is irritated by Alma’s inability to speak. Gretchen is consumed by her own grief over the death of her mother and regularly calls her mother’s answering machine as a way to connect with her and express her frustrations. When it is revealed that Luis sold his mother’s house and only sent a box of his belongings to Germany, Gretchen is furious. She later discovers that Alma left a message on the answering machine, using text-to-speech, asking for Gretchen’s mother to come visit her because she misses her. (Alma does not realize that Gretchen’s mother has died.) This is the turning point in their relationship. If there’s one person left in Gretchen’s family who cares about her, it’s Alma.

That’s why Gretchen goes to great lengths to protect Alma at the end of the movie. The two embrace as they walk past Henry and König while pointing guns at each other. In this way, Gretchen protects Alma from Henry, who wants to shoot her since she is a humanoid bird, and Alma protects Gretchen from König, who sees Gretchen getting in her way. In the end, Alma saves the day when she puts her hands over Gretchen’s ears, protecting her from her before she lets out the same kind of scream that The Hooded Woman used. This disorients Henry and König long enough for the girls to escape and the men to shoot each other. The two sisters meet up with Ed, still dressed in a hospital gown, and eventually drive away from the compound.

Cuckoo He may be a little crazy with his bird woman insemination plot, but he gives great scares and his heart is in the right place. Throughout the film, Gretchen becomes more accepting of her little sister and chooses her for who she is, like Alma always wanted her to. Sometimes a family is a teenager, her older European girlfriend, and a parasitic bird breeding child, and that’s beautiful.

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