Grief can be difficult to express in a concrete and truthful manner, posing a challenge for artists that filmmaker Johannes Nyholm briefly and joltingly overcomes in Koko-di Koko-da. This surrealist horror film concerns a couple, Elin (Ylva Gallon) and Tobias (Leif Edlund), whose daughter, Maja (Katrina Jakobson), dies from food poisoning, on her birthday no less, while the family is in a hospital for Elin’s own food-related ailment. This scene is staged with assured offhandedness, allowing us to feel the shock of sudden death, and it’s later complemented by a haunting pair of hand-drawn sequences, in which a pair of rabbits lose their offspring and take vengeance on the colorful bird who played an accidental role in the bunny’s death. The primitiveness of the animation paradoxically suggests the enormity of loss, with the gradually dying bird embodying the extinguishing of Elin and Tobias’s love. Formally, the sequences come out of nowhere—jarring like the tragedy that the couple faces—and are pointedly at odds with the aesthetic of the remainder of the film.
These moments cut to the heart of the terror of loss driving Koko-di Koko-da, which is named after a nursery rhyme played by a music box that Maja receives for her birthday, and Nyholm springs another potentially devastating concept that soon locks the film in a holding pattern. Three years after Maja’s death, Elin and Tobias go camping in the woods, and it’s evident from the long drive that their relationship has grown bitter and resentful, rife with toxicity that can be coaxed to the surface by an incident as banal as the picking of the wrong ice cream flavor. In the woods, the couple is terrorized by a trio of carnies—a dandy (Peter Belli), a strongman (Morad Baloo Khatchadorian), and a woman (Brandy Litmanen) with elaborate hair that evokes Maleficent—who quickly murder Elin while Tobias cowers in their tent.
The episode ends before Tobias is killed on screen, concluding with a striking aerial shot that’s reminiscent of the best scene in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, and the film starts all over again, with Elin and Tobias once again driving toward the woods to their doom. We’re seemingly caught up alongside the protagonists in a temporal loop, a la Harold Raimis’s Groundhog Day and its many imitators. Most resonant, though, are the appearances of the killers, who suggest a deranged form of the characters on the music box that Maja once coveted.
Elin and Tobias are tormented by Maja’s memory in a literal horror-movie fashion, then, as a once joyful artifact is perverted by harbingers of danger. Tobias’s casual cowardice suggests his sense of failing his family, while Elin’s quick death scenes embody her feelings of being abandoned by Tobias. As the episodes progress, there’s an implication that Tobias is faintly remembering each skirmish, which does nothing to amplify his courage, as he uses his foreknowledge to protect himself and only himself. This disturbing material is reminiscent of other films dealing with grief and marital collapse—especially Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, the latter of which also informs the impressively primordial look of the woods here—yet Koko-di Koko-da is nowhere near as impactful. The characters in those other films feel like human beings, while Elin and Tobias are less surprising automatons stuck in a vice of repetition that mirrors the process of recovery and nothing else.
Koko-di Koko-da is intellectualized and predigested, abundant in fraught yet self-conscious signifiers that are either derivative, such a shot of a spider in its web, or willfully random, like a white cat in the forest or the dead dog that the stereotypically “weird” carnies have with them. The utilization of slasher-film motifs in the service of exploring grief also doesn’t make much sense. For one, why would a child’s toy beckon a nightmare world? Nothing hinders surrealism more than the sense that its creators are actively working for it, though Koko-di Koko-da is nonetheless difficult to dismiss. Its animated sequences alone possess a rich personal intensity, their stark simplicity refuting the contrivances of Nyholm’s surrounding gimmickry.
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