078 REVIEW
Directed by
JOHANNES NYHOLM
Starring
LEIF EDLUND
PETER BELLI
YLVA GALLON
Released
27 MARCH
ANTICIPATION.
The poster has a cat on it, so
interest is instantly piqued.
ENJOYMENT.
Weird, repetitive and
jarring – like a nightmare.
IN RETROSPECT.
A Twilight Zone of grief.
hree figures walk through the woods – giant
Sampo (Morad Baloo Khatchadorian),
raven-haired Cherry (Brandy Litmanen)
and old, suited Mog (Peter Belli). They are
accompanied by both a live dog and a dead one
(which Sampo carries) – and Mog whistles and sings
a song about the death of his rooster, and about
the song (“koko-di koko-da”) that it will never
sing again. These same three grotesques are then
shown painted on the side of an antique spinning
music box which eight-year-old Maja (Katarina
Jakobson) stares at through a shop window while
her parents Elin (Yiva Gallon) and Tobias (Leif
Edlund Johansson) desperately look for her. It is
the day before Maja’s birthday, and the family of
three, all dressed in rabbit make-up, have crossed
over from Sweden for a celebratory vacation
in Denmark.
This prologue to Koko-di Koko-da, wherein
media are mixed, borders are crossed, the folkloric
intrudes upon the real, and loss and death hover at
the margins, serves as an apt introduction to the
narrative that will follow, as three years later, Elin
and Tobias are once again vacationing together,
only this time under less joyous circumstances.
After all, the opening sequence ends, suddenly
and arbitrarily, in tragedy, and that event is still
haunting the two parents now as they drive and
argue bitterly, the merest shadow of the happy
couple they once were.
“You don’t even know where we are, you just
keep on going,” Elin complains, and while her
words have an immediate, literal reference (theyare lost on a forest road at night), they also resound
with broader, more metaphorical undertones.
Moving on autopilot through their empty lives,
this pair is also drifting apart. When they finally
stop to camp in the middle of nowhere, Tobias will
wake up in the morning to find himself vainly (and
repeatedly) trying to fight or flee murderously
sadistic invasions by Mog, Sampo and Cherry, while
Elin, all alone, will be drawn through the wintry
landscape to a private theatre where her unresolved
feelings of loss will be staged as a shadow play
with rabbits.
Written and directed by Johannes Nyholm (The
Giant, 2016), Koko-di Koko-da is a dark allegory- part folk horror, part surreal psychodrama –
in which two lost souls live, or perhaps dream,
their way through the different, seemingly
inescapable permutations of their trauma in
an isolated location. This woodland setting,
suggestive both of a fairy tale and a classic camp
slasher, becomes the site where problems are
confronted with disoriented imagination and
panicky fantasy, and where visitations of random,
unstoppable, wrenching violence meet moments of
theatricalised epiphany.
Ultimately, when they wake to face the mo(u)
rning, Tobias and Elin may still find themselves in
a rut, but at least now they are in it together again,
rather than struggling separately to find a way out
of their harrowing emotional impasses – and their
passive-aggressive recriminations. It’s a strange,
mythically menacing journey through grief and the
self-torments of guilt. ANTON BITEL
Koko-Di, Koko-Da
T