Koko-di Koko-da

Three 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 (they are 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, 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.