Koko-di Koko-da

In this Swedish film, writer-director Johannes Nyholm posits grief as a time-loop.

The title comes from a French children’s song. As an indication of the tone Nyholm was aiming for, the song’s catchy, upbeat tune contrasts with its lyrics about a rooster that cannot sing koko-di koko-da anymore because he is dead.

The plot follows Tobias and Elin, a couple who open the film enduring a terrible tragedy. Fast-forward three years and they’ve grown cold to each other, communicating only in verbal snipes. A camping vacation in the countryside turns into a nightmare when three near-fantastical characters emerge from the woods and trap them in a time loop ending in humiliation and murder.

At first, Tobias learns from past loops and leverages this knowledge to get ahead of his assailants, only to find his efforts futile. Nyholm avoids the obvious trope of having Tobias literally enact the stages of grief, and the time-loop’s cyclical nature effectively mirrors a spiraling depression as Tobias’s efforts to escape all lead to the same fate, creating an escalating sense of hopelessness.

But here’s where the film’s concept unravels. With Tobias being the only one experiencing the loop, Elin gets relegated to an obstacle. Nyholm addresses this too late by having Elin experience her own loop several cycles in, devoid of Tobias. This breaks the narrative’s iterative nature and renders the ending moot. If they’re both in independent loops, how can they escape?

Compounding matters, Nyholm underwrites his characters. Groundhog Day worked because of Bill Murray, not the time loop premise. Murray’s innate charisma and deadpan humor proved eminently watchable, even though he opened the film as an egomaniacal ass.

As Tobias and Elin, Leif Edlund and Ylva Gallon convince, but lack the innate charisma necessary to make us want to invest in them, even before their tragedy. Nyholm writes them as one-dimensional. Tobias is cowardly and condescending, Elin is passive-aggressive and prone to shrieking.

Still, Koko-di Koko-da is not without its strengths. The three assailants, led by Peter Belli dressed as a sideshow barker, prove memorable, and Nyholm imbues their scenes with a tone-perfect mix of surrealism and grounded horror. Consider the scene where Tobias emerges from the tent clad only in his underpants, dirty and bleeding, how he contrasts with Belli’s pristine, all-white suit.

Nyholm was on to something with his three antagonists and was wise to aim beyond simple exploitation horror. Unfortunately, his grief-as-a-time-loop concept doesn’t quite work—at least applied to a couple, rendering this film a minor disappointment. Swedish cinema fans may find more cultural context to chew on here, but others would do well to pass.