What on earth, in the name of bird flu, is this film trying to tell us?
Photo: Neon/Everett Collection
Under most circumstances, a trip to the Alps sounds like a dream vacation. But in The screaming horror film by German director Tilman Singer, cuckooa mountain resort in the style of the Overlook Hotel, sends Hunter Schafer down a terrifying, vomit-filled rabbit hole. The lesson here is twofold: always read hotel reviews before booking, and under no circumstances travel anywhere with your emotionally unavailable father and his new family. But what the heck was up with that crazy ending?
In the first two acts cuckoo is all about sibling rivalry, parental neglect and the cyclical nature of grief. But then Mr. Koenig – our sinister, Pied Piper-like hotelier, played by Dan Stevens with a thick German accent – whips out his little recorder to lure us all into a gloriously ridiculous finale. Somewhere between the chloroforming, the introduction of a humanoid bird-woman species and an extended shootout during which one character dangles a cigarette in his mouth, you might feel a little lost. What on earth, in the name of bird flu, is this film trying to tell us and, more importantly, how does this whole “brood parasite” thing work?
The story is relatively simple, if not adequately explained: Koenig runs a resort where a strange species of bird-woman forcibly impregnates unsuspecting vacationers. The hybrid woman’s siren-like calls trap victims within earshot in a time loop, rendering them helpless. Schafer plays a sullen teenager named Gretchen, whose father Luis (Marton Csokas) moves the family to the Alps to help Koenig build a new resort, and in the end it turns out that his other daughter, Gretchen’s half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), is the product of one of these forced “laying ceremonies.”
If you know Singer’s first film, Lightin which a taxi driver tries to escape from a possessed woman, you probably knew that cuckoo would end with more questions than answers. Still, there are some fascinating themes and insights from this fleeting plot. Let’s try to unravel them one by one.
What is Cuckoo actually about?
Initially, cuckoo feels like an allegory of grief. Gretchen’s mother recently died, and significantly, we first see her driving to her new home in the moving van, while Luis drives ahead with his wife Beth (Jessica Henwick) and their daughter Alma.
Over and over again, cuckoo shows us how isolated Gretchen feels in her father’s family. When Gretchen is attacked by a crazy blonde woman wearing a hoodie and trench coat, her father insists she must have simply fallen off her bike. Alma, on the other hand, gets all of Luis’ attention when she is hospitalized due to mysterious seizures. When a doctor says that abrupt changes in the family may have caused the brain trauma, Luis blames Gretchen. Never mind that he’s the one who decided to move his family to the Alps and open a new resort with that creepy king guy.
We know early on that there is something strange and probably supernatural about the hooded blonde woman. Whenever she screams, the camera zooms in on her bleating throat as everyone who can hear her relives the same few seconds over and over again. One could argue that these hypnotic moments evoke a common cliche of being stuck in time as a metaphor for grief.
What role Koenig plays in this is initially unclear, but he is obviously the well-coiffed mastermind; the woman seems to respond whenever he plays his recorder. After kidnapping Gretchen, it eventually becomes clear that he is the one orchestrating these “laying down” ceremonies to protect the species. From there, the film begins to play with new themes of bodily autonomy and nature versus nurture. (Is Alma destined to become a monster because her mother is one of those bird women, or can she control her own destiny?)
So this hotel is overrun by female birds that practically lay their eggs inside women?
Yes! A detective named Henry (Jan Bluthardt) explains it to Gretchen: Cuckoos are “brood parasites” who lay their eggs in the nests of other birds so that those birds can raise their young for them. The bird-woman hybrids in this crazy place do the same with King’s help.
Why does König want to help the female birds spread their eggs?
They have supernatural powers, and he sees himself as a “conservationist,” and… well, that’s pretty much all we know. He just really loves these”Homo Cuckooridai,” I think so! (For the record, I have no idea if I spelled that correctly, but I couldn’t not mention the name because it’s hilarious.)
How do these “laying ceremonies” work? Physiologically?
It’s totally unclear. Basically, King blows his recorder, a bird woman comes and does her screeching thing, and then the woman within earshot falls into this convulsive trance where she sits on the bed rubbing her own legs while the bird woman reaches out to her with some kind of slime on her hand. We never see how it goes from there.
Wait, what kind of slime? Is it something like…?
All I can tell you is that the screaming woman’s hand is covered in slime and there is a puddle on the floor beneath her. Make of that what you will.
How does this place even find guests? Do they still have a great Expedia review?
It’s hard to say as the resort looks amazing, but if I saw guests walking around the lobby throwing up with no one to help them, I would probably mention it in the review!
Speaking of aesthetics, why does Koenig have this whole elaborate prison set up for Gretchen, complete with Ikea furniture, when it looks like his Homo Cuckoos or whoever barely spends any time there?
I don’t know, but I envy their run-down living rooms.
And didn’t he lure her into this prison by offering to drive her to the train station? Wouldn’t that have been suspicious, given his shady charisma?
Right? Gretchen has been watching this man like a hawk throughout the entire movie and wasn’t going to let him pick her up and take her home after her night shift at the reception, but suddenly she trusts him to take her to the train station? Please.
And Gretchen’s father is involved in all this?
So it seems! And so do the doctors on site, who anaesthetize Alma’s mother because they have decided that it is time for Alma to unite with her bird-lady mother. But then Koenig shows up and shoots them both because they have apparently secretly stored data that they should not have stored.
Speaking of which, didn’t that detective Henry shoot him? How is he even still alive?
If there’s a rule in this movie, it’s that you have to kill someone at least a couple of times before they actually die. Also consider this: Henry jumps back into the action after Gretchen stabs him multiple times, and the goggles-wearing bird woman gets crushed by a library-sized bookshelf and still survives.
Why was she the only one of these women wearing protective goggles? What are they doing?
No idea, but they look cool.
And why do all bird women wear these blonde wigs? Is that The WitchesAre you unsure?
Again, I wish I knew. In the case of Goggle Lady, she is bald underneath.
Is there a possibility that Gretchen’s dead mother is somehow one of the bird ladies?
You know, I actually thought of that at the end when Gretchen ripped the wig off Alma’s mother, aka Goggle Lady, and looked at her with a look of recognition. Towards the end, she also yells “Mommy’s dead” to King, which felt like a strikingly odd way to phrase it. But it’s really unclear.
Anyway, if Alma is not actually Beth’s biological child, why does she look like her biological mother Beth and not like one of the bird women?
Good question. 🤷
And at the very end, when Gretchen carries Alma through the gunfight between King and Henry, why doesn’t Henry just shoot Gretchen to make sure Alma can’t leave if he’s convinced she’s growing up to be a monster?
I mean, he promised Gretchen to protect her, but I have no idea why he would keep that promise to a complete stranger when ending this whole operation sooooo important to him. Anyway, when they reach the end of their little catwalk, Gretchen tells Alma to scream, she’ll figure out how to do it, and they leave.
Why didn’t she just let Alma do that before they left the closet?
That would have been smarter! But it all worked out in the end. They drive off with this hotel guest named Ed, who Gretchen had been making out with earlier, and as they rest in safety, we see Alma’s ears twitching – a sign that while Gretchen believes more in the “nurture” than the “nature” of things, Alma retains the potential for destruction.
