Today we bring you Smile 2 and Cuckoo. What do they have in common? (That is, aside from a 2024 release year.) Well, let’s check it out!
The characters in both films are musicians. In Smile 2, the protagonist, Skye Riley, is a famous pop performer. She has recovered from a cocaine-induced car accident where her boyfriend was killed and is preparing for a new concert tour. She suffers from back pain as a result of the accident. One night, she goes to see her old drug dealer in order to buy some Vicodin. He behaves erratically, saying that he’s experiencing “scary, haunted house shit.” He then proceeds to pulverize his face with a gym weight, all the while smiling creepily. Soon after, Skye begins to see more people with creepy smiles that may or may not be real.
Gretchen, the protagonist in in Cuckoo, is a seventeen-year-old girl who goes to live with her father and mute half-sister in the Bavarian Alps. She plays bass in a band, and the importance of music in the film is explained in this Los Angeles Times article interviewing the director, Tilman Singer. When Gretchen takes a job as a front desk clerk at a nearby resort run by a family friend, she begins to see women vomiting and behaving oddly. She is also pursued one night while riding her bicycle home by strange-looking woman. Gretchen becomes fed up with the whole situation and longs to go back to America with her mother. Gretchen meets a French woman at the resort and leaves with her. The women who pursued Gretchen shows up in the road, causing the two to swerve and crash.
Cuckoo is a more complicated film to dig into than Smile 2. While the supernatural antagonist isn’t entirely explained in Smile 2, it’s not as weird as the creature in Cuckoo. The woman who caused Gretchen’s car accident is referred to as a “Homo cuculidae“. Though the creature is a humanoid, it also has the ability to implant its eggs into women so they will incubate its offspring. The creature is similar to a cuckoo bird in that cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, leaving them to be raised the bird while the cuckoo takes off. The aforementioned family friend, Herr König, is fascinated by Homo cuculidae and makes it his mission to help the creatures reproduce, since they are just following their instincts.
While the Homo cuculidae and König are driven to breed, the entity in Smile 2 seeks to drive its target insane to the point of suicide. Whoever witnesses the act of suicide is then targeted for the same fate. The entity wants to murder and torment. What makes the creatures in both films somewhat similar is that they both can distort reality. The Homo cuculidae are capable of emitting a piercing sound from their mouths that causes time to repeat itself in brief increments, disorienting their victim. The entity in Smile 2 causes horrific hallucinations that are impossible to separate from reality. So the latter entity is considerably more evil and powerful.
The endings of the films are different, however. For anyone who has seen the original Smile and not the sequel, imagine an ending many, many times more terrifying in its implications (not that one needs to see the original to comprehend the sequel). Cuckoos has a more hopeful conclusion.
Flickchart stats:
Smile 2
- Global ranking: 11,436
- Wins 54% of its matchups
- 1 user has it at #1
- 3 users have it in their top 20
Cuckoo
- Global ranking: 19,964
- Wins 48% of its matchups
- 0 users have it at #1
- 5 users have it in their top 20
