Cracow Monsters is a Polish fantasy-horror series currently streaming on Netflix. It stars Barbara Liberek as Alex, a young medical student who joins an eccentric research group that secretly investigates the occult events engulfing Cracow.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Alexandra, shortened to Alex, is a fresher student at Cracow’s medical school. She often has nightmares and wakes up at 3 am. Her roommate and close friend Mary thinks she has schizophrenia and insists she visit a therapist. She thinks somewhat similarly but has difficulty convincing herself.
On her way to the university for an entrance exam, she buys a hot dog for a young boy, Rafel. Lucky, an older medical student whom she met at a bar conducts the exam.
Lucky is a senior student in Professor Zawadzki’s research group; Zawadzki and Lucky choose Alex to be the ninth member of their mysterious group. To confirm their judgment, Lucky takes Alex on a ride and drowns her to see if she can make it out alive.
A white supernatural being saves her and she wakes up in her room. Soon after, she is accepted to join Professor Zawadzki’s research group. Zawadzki’s students live together, so she is called by the administration and asked to move.
When she tries to inform her grandmother about her changed address, the latter keeps warning her about evil forces. In her new place, she meets the other students, each eccentric in their way.
Alex has nightmares again, she wakes up and hears a conversation between Zawadzki and Lucky. It reveals that she is essentially the ninth member of an occult group. Out of shock and fright, she attempts to run away.
She follows an old Slavic voice that leads her to the house of Rafel. With the help of the white supernatural being, she defeats a demon but cannot save Rafel.
The others follow her and discover what has happened. For a split second, she sees the young boy open his eyes but others cannot. She meets Mary on the way and takes her to the morgue to confirm if Rafel was dead.
Rafel is possessed by a demon named Harewit. Meanwhile, the middle-aged man who had found a mysterious-looking object while working in a mine is led to Rafel through it. He becomes Rafel’s servant and they wake up the dead in the morgue.
Lucky and Alex visit the morgue to discover more about the mystery but they end up being attacked by the zombies. Rafel also invokes two female demons from the dark water to follow his will.
A female demon seduces and attacks Gigi, one of their group members. The others manage to capture her and take Gigi to a pigsty for a cleansing ritual. Rafel raises spas, a winter giant, and Alex releases the female demon. Spas is instructed to roam around Cracow and leave frozen bodies.
Alex visits her grandmother and learns bits about her past. She and Lucky visit the hospital archive to learn about her birth. A symbol scratched by her mother leads them to a statue of a dragon. The group gets together and plots coordinates in a map, the point through which all the lines pass, gets them closer to the truth. They are led to Cracow’s city centre, where Alex was born.
Zawadzki’s son falls ill and Spas raises chaos in the city. Everyone has to attend to the hospital to aid a plague-like condition. Alex and Lucky find a possessed boy in the morgue, Lucky kills him against Alex’s wish.
To cure his son, Zawadzki is ordered to bring a living newborn to Rafel. He also steals a beating heart from a homeless man’s body and feeds it to his son to cure him. Meanwhile, Alex finds the key to the underworld from her mother’s bag and enters there.
In the underworld, she realizes that she is an incarnation of Wanda, one with the power to subdue Hvor. She gets trapped while freeing Wanda but escapes with the help of her guardian angel.
Up in the mortal world, she progresses towards her goal to defeat Hvor.
If you have any doubts about the ending, here’s a full breakdown.
Cracow Monsters ending explained in detail:
A recreation of the past
Alex is left distraught after Lucky’s death. To understand the secrets of Wanda, Zawadzki suggests they recreate her death.
They go to a public bathhouse, where Alex takes a booster to recreate the sensation of drowning. In her dissociative state, she understands that they need to perform a ritual to defeat Hvor. But she needs all nine of them to be able to do so.
The ritual
The moon gets drenched in a shade of red. Alex finds the miner, who had escaped from Rafel. Zawadzki interferes when the miner talks to Alex. They take him to their house, where the object is found to be the Triglav, an essential component of the ritual.
The nine members take their positions in the required coordinates and start chanting a spell to defeat Hvor. Rafel comes for Alex and attacks her. However, with collective chanting, Hvor, here Rafel is overpowered.
Alex burns the Triglav, which kills the evil deity. This fulfils her prophecy and ushers a new era.
Epilogue
Although evil, Alex had killed a deity and inadvertently broken eternal law. On her way to class, she is warned by the God of the underworld that she will face repercussions of her act, thus initiating the premise for a new season.
Zawadzki’s son recovers, and the city seemingly gets back to normal. However, in the last scene, we see Lucky alive.
It could be that he was never dead or brought back from the dead by Alex’s guardian angel. On a darker side, it could also be that he became possessed.
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