The Baffling, Nonsensical Ending of 'Cuckoo' Explained (2024)

That doesn’t mean that Cuckoo isn’t good. It is at times creepy and at other times, compelling, even if the meaning behind the film remains elusive. It’s like waking up from a nightmare that you can’t explain but, like, in a good way! Also, Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens are tremendous.

For those who are here because you want to know what it’s about, well, that’s not entirely clear, either. Hunter Schafer plays a teenager named Gretchen (also a little confusing because Schafer is 25 now). After her mother’s death, she moves with her father, Luis, stepmother, Beth, and her mute half-sister Alma, to a resort town in the Bavarian Alps. The family is there to help build a new hotel, overseen by the enigmatic Herr König (Dan Stevens), who offers Gretchen a job at the front desk.

There, things immediately start to get weird. While working at the reception desk, Gretchen encounters multiple female guests vomiting. Alma suffers seizures triggered by a mysterious reverberating shriek. Then, Gretchen — while riding her bike home — is chased by a strange hooded woman. She looks like this:

Throughout the movie, Gretchen has odd experiences where moments repeat themselves several times. It’s not clear there’s a reason for this — the repeating moments do not seem to follow any rules of logic — other than Tilman Singer thought it looked cool and eerie. He is right!

Dan Stevens plays Herr König, who turns out to be more than just a hotel owner. It’s not entirely clear what he does, but he’s German and creepy and a lot of fun to watch, and that’s really what matters. There’s a detective, Henry, who gets involved, too. He’s investigating a murder linked to the hooded woman, and he and Gretchen team up to uncover the truth.

For the first two-thirds of the film, Cuckoo manages to be both intriguing and unsettling. And then the film tries to explain itself, and that’s where it goes off the rails. The short version is: The hooded woman is a bizarre human-like species that, like the cuckoo bird, is a brood parasite. I didn’t know this about cuckoo birds, but they leave their eggs to be raised by other bird species. That’s what the creepy woman-like person does: She somehow implants her egg inside of human women, who then raise the offspring as their own.

It turns out that Alma is one of these cuckoo-like creatures. König has been experimenting with preserving this species at the resort. He wants to reunite Alma with her biological mother (the hooded woman), which is supposed to be a big deal because it will strengthen the species in some way. Meanwhile, Henry — who lost his wife to one of these brood parasites — wants to kill Alma, her mother, and König to end these experiments. König wants to kill Henry and Gretchen — the latter of whom he sees as a threat to Alma — while Gretchen also wants to end the experiments but is determined to save Alma both from Henry and König.

Ultimately, that’s what she does: There’s a big showdown in the end, where Gretchen manages to kill the hooded woman by stabbing her in the throat with a butterfly knife. König and Henry shoot each other dead. In a twist, Alma reveals her own ability to emit the paralyzing scream of the cuckoo woman, using it to help her and Gretchen escape. The sisters flee the resort town with Ed, a character introduced earlier in the film who Gretchen had planned to run away with before all hell broke loose.

It’s a wild ride that doesn’t entirely make sense, but it’s definitely an experience. If you’re into creepy vibes and don’t mind being a bit confused, Cuckoo might be your jam. But if logic and a coherent plot are important, the performances may not be enough to overcome the nonsense on display.