Koko-di koko-da

Koko-di Koko-da is about a young couple, a man and a woman with a deep trauma that is slowly tearing them apart. They have reached an endpoint in their relationship and something is about to give. The first thing to breaks is their reality.

On a dull camping-trip the couple encounter a troupe of three menacing and allegorical figures that suddenly emerges from the woods. Things quickly turns nightmarish. The man keeps reliving the violent encounter time after time while the woman remembers nothing of it. She in her turn experience her own nightmare, less violent but cold and lonely.

Johannes Nyholm is a very visual artist with some quirky and frankly stunningly beautiful pictures. While Koko-di Koko-da is dense and dark, it is not hopeless and I left the theater feeling quite elate. So, it's not for everyone but give it a go. All in all it's a beautiful experience.

... and you're still overwhelmed from the loss of a child a few years earlier, then be prepared for some surreal, dark and psychedelic like goings on from a trio of weird wood wanderers. Extremely bizarre and fantastical, an imaginative way to emphasise the challenge of overcoming loss and the torment that loss can infuse in the minds of the emotionally tortured.

Saw this at the Rotterdam film festival 2019, where it was part of the official Tiger Competition. It is not a variation on A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971) or Funny Games (Haneke 1997) that I deduced from the synopsis, but very different. It kept us awake and let us suffer along with the candidate vicitims. I was glad that the recurrent encounters with the evil threesome were very different each time, luckily leaving out redundant repeats from previous instances, like the discussion in the car about B&B versus tent. The role of the white cat is not clear to me, maybe just a gimmick letting us wonder whether its recurrent appearances were intended to mean something.

There is no morale or message embedded in the story, other than Tobias and Elin stopping their previous mutual nitpicking in the final scene and visually were connected again. What still puzzles me is that only Tobias seems to remember the previous encounters with the evil threesome, albeit only part of it and only knowing that some awful things are about to happen again, contrary to Elin who has no reminescenses at all. On the other hand, we see Elin following the white cat in a nightly quest of her own. Another mystery is why the evil threesome pops up at places far away from the camping spot where the couple fled from, after a fruitless attempt to evade unhappy encounters like the previous.

All in all, a lot of things are not understood but may mean something. The movie does not make me long for a real explanation, however. The only morale or message that I could deduce from this movie was that the couple may have been at a breaking point in their relationship when the story started, but were visibly together again near the end after the dire events they went through.

What if you could go back and do just one thing differently...would it be enough to change the outcome? To shift the path of your destiny?

That's the sort of question this bizarre Swedish fantasy-horror-mystery film confronts.

3 years after losing their child to a freak food poisoning accident...a young couple goes on a roadtrip to honour her memory.

Though fraught with arguments from the get-go, there hasn't been any real hitch in their plans...until he decides to pull off to camp along a secluded private road.

This throws them into some sort of twisted cyclical time loop...in which they both die a vicious death at the end.

However, at the end of each scenario they find themselves in...they always reawake to find themselves in the tent, moments before the interaction with their killers is about to take place.

And each time this happens, they are endowed with a little more knowledge...about what not to do...in the situation.

Though nothing seems to ever go their way.

Considering the structure of the plot, the film has a very odd chronology.

So it takes some attention to follow.

But it's not overly complex.

One might describe it as Groundhog Day in Hell.

A Hell somewhere between Deliverance and Wolf Creek.

They really do do a good job of inducing anxiety and frustration...as you want to see the beleaguered couple free themselves from this vicious loop of violent death.

But you can't help but wish that a little more happened...especially considering a good portion of the film is animated filler that really has no other purpose than to inflate the runtime a little.

That aside...it's a nice twist on the whole Deliverance thing.

The backwoods family was genuinely creepy.

And there were a few moments to make you jump.

It's certainly not as extreme as something like Wolf Creek- the level of ultraviolence is mild in comparison.

But it wins some points with the whole sci fi angle.

In the end...it's one of those see it...or don't...kind of films.

It's worth the time if you think it sounds interesting...but you aren't missing a masterpiece if you decide to skip it.

5 out of 10.

At its core Koko-Di Koko-Da (2019) is a story of a man and his wife, lost in maze-like wilderness in and around the dense forests of Sweden, whilst being terrorized by a small band of eccentric characters. It's also a surreal, low budget horror film about grief and unrelenting sadness.

The directing is insisting and noteworthy, and the performances are all great. Dismissing it merely as artsy, would just undermine its intention. Koko-Di Koko-Da definitely has a purpose, and an clear vision. But it is unconventional.

Gore is on a scale 2/10 Movie is 6.5/10

I'm glad I watched it.