When laser beam propagates through the turbulent atmosphere, there are branch points in wavefront, which are caused by deep turbulence or long propagation distance. Conventional least-square reconstruction algorithms cannot restore the discontinuous wavefront, which severely limits correction performance of an adaptive optics system. If the incoming wavefront contains a branch cut, there is \rm2n\textπ difference between the measured phase difference and the principle phase difference, which is the reason why conventional least-square reconstruction algorithms cannot reconstruct wavefront with branch points. The complex exponential reconstructor is developed to restore the discontinuous wavefront with phase difference replaced by complex exponents. However, thousands of iterations are required by the complex exponential reconstructor before converging to an acceptable solution. In order to speed up the iterative calculation, the cascadic multigrid method (CMG) is introduced in the process of wavefront reconstruction. The proposed method can be used to restore discontinuous wavefront with lower residual error similar to those reconstructed by the direct iteration. The number of float point multiplications required by the CMG method is nearly 2 orders of magnitude lower than that required by the direct iteration. The acceleration of the CMG method increases with the number of subapertures increasing. The performance of CMG method to recover continuous wavefront is also investigated and compared with conventional wavefront reconstruction algorithm based on successive over-relaxation. It is shown that the CMG method has good capability for wavefront reconstruction with high precision and low computation cost no matter whether it is applied to discontinuous or continuous wavefront. Furthermore, the CMG method is used in the adaptive optics for correcting the turbulence aberration. The direct slope wavefront reconstruction algorithm based on the assumption that the measured slope and the control voltage satisfy the linear relationship cannot restore the wavefront with branch points. As a result, the adaptive optics system with the CMG method doubles the correction quality evaluated by the Strehl ratio compared with that with the direct slope wavefront reconstruction algorithm.