A Cinematic Nightmare Even More Terrifying Than Trump’s America
You can’t fight grief, much less reason with it or attempt to flee it—wherever you go, there it is, preying upon you with little remorse and even less restraint. It’s an omnipresent predator, poking and prodding and mocking you until you just want to scream in anguish. Not that crying out does any good either; in the face of such a sinister adversary, the best one can do is endure, which, Koko-di Koko-da suggests, often requires locating the very thing that’s hardest to find at those painful moments: compassion for one’s self, and others.
As with his prior The Giant, Swedish director Johannes Nyholm’s Koko-di Koko-da is a folklore-y film in which the boundaries between the authentic and the imaginary are flimsy and traversable. However, unlike its predecessor, which made clear formal and narrative distinctions between those two realms, this haunting nightmare blends the real and the unreal until the two are indistinguishable. In that regard, this mesmerizing sophomore effort—think a sinister riff on Groundhog Day, or a bleaker and more wrenching variation of Happy Death Day—is a significant leap forward for the filmmaker, generating unease from its creepy imagery and unnerving signature song, and poignancy from its depiction of the struggle to cope with unfathomable loss.
In virtual cinemas on Nov. 6 (and on VOD Dec. 8), Koko-di Koko-da sets its surreal mood from the outset. In the foreboding woods, a cheery, whistling older gentleman named Mog (‘60s rock star Peter Belli) wearing a white suit and bowler hat, and wielding a cane, sings a nursery rhyme (“My rooster is dead, he will never sing koko-di, koko-da”). He resembles a demented Swedish version of The Music Man’s Harold Hill, and following behind him are crazy-haired young Cherry (Brandy Litmanen) leading a fearsome dog on a leash, and disheveled lumberjack-y giant Sampo (Morad Baloo Khatchadorian) carrying a dead pooch. As Mog croons his haunting tune, the film fades to a close-up of a music box decorated with an illustration of this trio, and then to young Maja (Katarina Jakobson)—her face painted to resemble a bunny rabbit – staring at it through a shop window. A moment later, her parents Tobias (Leif Edlund) and Elin (Yiva Gallon) arrive, simultaneously panicked over the fact that the girl had wandered off, and relieved to have found her.