“Cuckoo” is a surreal movie directed by Tilman Singer, known for his unconventional style. The story is about Gretchen, a girl who is 17 years old and is played by Hunter Schafer. Gretchen and her father Luis (Marton Csokas) move to a resort in the Bavarian Alps with his new family after her mother dies. She finds it hard to get along with her new stepmother (Jessica Henwick) and her half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), who has seizures and is mute.
When Gretchen gets to the resort, things start to feel off. Herr König (Dan Stevens), the owner, acts strangely and seems to be very interested in Alma. Strange sounds are coming from the woods, and Gretchen sees a scary-looking white figure following her. As she gets used to her new home, she learns some unsettling things about the resort and the people who live there.
König hides his bad plans from Gretchen and her family by acting like a friendly host. The first sign that he is bad is that he locks Gretchen in his pool house. Inside, Gretchen is tormented by a high-pitched shrieking sound that has been present throughout the movie and is linked to a car accident that almost killed her and a tourist she met earlier, Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey).
When König plays a tune on his recorder to get the teenage girl to come into the pool house with Gretchen, things go dark. Then he tries to choke Gretchen with a pillow. When Henry (Jan Bluthardt), a former cop whose wife died because of König’s experiments, walks in, things get worse. First Henry shoots König, and then he kills the scared teenage girl.
Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) and Henry (Jan Bluthardt) barely get away from König (Dan Stevens), so they run to König’s hospital, where they find out something very scary. Gretchen’s half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), has been put to sleep and put in an observation room. This isn’t a normal medical procedure; it’s just a set-up for something much worse. Alma is about to be picked up by her real mother, the hooded bird woman who has been haunting Gretchen the whole movie.
The Real Story Behind Alma
It turns out that Alma is not completely human. Beth and Luis’s (Jessica Henwick and Marton Csokas) honeymoon was at König’s resort many years ago. While Beth wasn’t aware it, she got pregnant with an egg from the humanoid bird species that König and the hooded woman are from. Like the cuckoo bird, this species relies on brood parasitism, which means they lay their eggs in the nests of other species to make sure their young survive. Because Alma is related to the hooded woman, she is a member of this rare and dangerous species.
When Henry finds out Alma’s true nature, he sees her as a threat and decides she needs to be killed before she can hurt other people. But Gretchen is determined to keep her sister safe, which makes things tense and emotional between the two. When Gretchen really wants to save Alma from being killed by Henry, she stabs him with her butterfly knife.
Then Gretchen talks to the woman in the hood in the hospital’s records room. Gretchen is smart and uses headphones to block out the sound because she knows that the woman’s sharp screeches are her weapon. During a fierce fight, Gretchen stabs the woman in the hood in the neck with her knife, killing her and ending the immediate danger to her life.
König, who was thought to be dead after Henry shot him, then comes back with a machine gun, which makes things even more dangerous. König and Henry are fighting because each of them wants to do something different. König wants to capture Alma for his experiments, and Henry wants to kill her. As the fighting gets worse, Gretchen stands between the two men to protect Alma.
König tries to get Alma to join him by saying he will help protect her species. At the same time, Henry tells Gretchen to move out of the way so he can kill Alma. Alma is scared and confused, but she decides to use her special skills to keep herself and Gretchen safe in the end. She puts her hands over Gretchen’s ears and makes a noise that sounds like her mother screeching. König and Henry are stuck in a painful time loop because of this sound, but Alma and Gretchen are able to get away in time.
Cuckoo (2024) Movie: Ending Explained!
Shots are heard coming from outside the hospital, which makes it sound like König and Henry killed each other in the chaos that followed. As Gretchen leads Alma out of the hospital and into the new day’s sunlight, it’s a small step away from the terrible things they’ve just been through.
They meet Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), the tourist that Gretchen had become friendly with earlier in the movie, in the hospital parking lot. Still hurt from what happened, Ed agrees to help them and offers to take them away from the nightmare they just got out of.
In a moving scene at the end of the movie, Gretchen holds Alma’s sleeping head in her lap as they drive off. At this point, Gretchen has decided to be Alma’s guardian, even though she doesn’t know what will happen with Alma as a potentially dangerous being in the future. This sad ending shows how deeply the movie looks at things like family, identity, and the thin line between being human and being monster.
Visit tvacute.com again soon for more “Cuckoo” news, previews, and recaps.
