What actually happens
A front desk job and a lot of vomiting guests
Gretchen is a grieving teenager whose mother has just died, and she relocates to a resort in the Bavarian mountains with her father Luis, her stepmother Beth and her mute half-sister Alma. The family has come to help construct a new hotel, and the hotel is run by the enigmatic Herr König, who hires Gretchen to work the front desk so she can settle in. Strange things start almost at once. Several female guests are seen vomiting, Alma has seizures whenever a reverberating shriek goes off, and one night while Gretchen is biking home, a hooded woman terrifies her. The police wave it off as a prank.
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An escape car meets the hooded woman
Gretchen meets Henry, a detective who is looking into a murder connected to the hooded woman. She also gets close to a guest named Ed, and the two of them plan to run away together. The attempt falls apart when they hear the shriek and nearly hit the hooded woman with their car, and the crash leaves Gretchen badly hurt and stuck at the resort while Ed recovers in the hospital. Henry tells Gretchen he thinks the hooded woman is behind at least one murder, in which the female victim choked on her own vomit, and that one of the vomiting women Gretchen saw may be involved. Together they watch a cottage, and there the hooded woman goes after Gretchen's coworker Trixie and tries to implant her with a strange slime.
A package of her mother's things, revealed by accident
The next day Gretchen demands to know why Luis and König are mixed up in the resort. König lets slip that a package of her mother's belongings has arrived for the family, and Luis admits he sold their old family home. Furious, Gretchen goes to her room and plays her mother's old voicemails. One of them is from Alma, who used text-to-speech to ask Gretchen's mother to call Gretchen so that she would be happy. When Gretchen comes out of her room, her family is gone. König tells her Alma had another seizure and was rushed to the hospital, and he offers to drive Gretchen to the train station so she can leave. First, he says, they have to go to his house, where he will hand her some cash.
A hotel manager with a flute and a plan
At König's house, he tells her the truth. Henry is a cop who was thrown out of the force, and the hooded woman is not a human being. She belongs to a near-human species that raises its young the way cuckoo birds do, by leaving them with other families. Their shrieks disorient humans and trigger their young to develop, and the young, like Alma, grow up inside human surrogates until they are ready to join their own kind. König has been trying to keep the species going at the resort, where Beth and Luis unknowingly spent their honeymoon years ago. This is the scene people dread most, and it comes in the second half. König shuts Gretchen inside a pool house and plays a flute to summon a teenage member of the species. It is drawn to her and tries to inseminate her with slime. Henry arrives just in time and shoots König and the creature.
Headphones turn out to be a weapon
Henry and Gretchen speed to the hospital, where König had planned to reunite Alma with her real mother, the hooded woman. On the way Gretchen realizes Henry means to kill Alma as well as the adult cuckoo, so she stabs him with her butterfly knife. She reaches Alma and holds the mother off by pretending she will stab Alma. Alma misunderstands and runs. The mother chases Gretchen, who muffles the screeching with a pair of headphones and drives a blade into the mother's throat, which ends her.
The ending, explained
Gretchen finds Alma and wins her trust back by thanking her for the message she left for their mother. They come across König, still alive, in a standoff with the injured Henry. Both men point guns at the sisters, so Alma puts her hands over Gretchen's ears and unleashes a huge shriek that leaves them disoriented long enough for the girls to get away. Henry and König shoot one another, and both die. Outside, the sisters meet Ed, who is recovering, and she drives them away from the resort. Gretchen, Alma and Ed all survive, and the hooded woman, König and Henry do not.
The post-credits ruling
There is no post-credits scene. You can leave when the credits start.
✓ Spoiled safelyDog status: fine, no dog dies.
Questions people ask at 1am
Is Cuckoo scary?
Yes, Cuckoo is a 6 out of 10. It is a slow mystery with several jump scares from the hooded woman, a shriek that lingers and a medium level of dread, with only a little gore.
How does Cuckoo end?
Gretchen stabs the hooded woman, and Henry and König end up shooting one another. Gretchen and her half-sister Alma escape the resort in Ed's car.
Does the dog die in Cuckoo?
No, no dog dies in Cuckoo. A dog gets out of a car near the beginning of the movie and is never shown or mentioned again.
Is there a post-credits scene in Cuckoo?
No. Cuckoo has no post-credits scene, so you can leave when the credits start.
What is the hooded woman in Cuckoo?
She belongs to a near-human species that leaves its young with human surrogates, like a cuckoo bird, and uses a shriek to disorient people. In Cuckoo, Alma is one of those young.
