KOKO DI KOKO DA
Dark Star Pictures
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Johannes Nyholm
Screenwriter: Johannes Nyholm
Cast: Ylva Gallon, Leif Edlund Johansson, Peter Belli, Katarina Jacobson, Morad Khatchadorian
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 3/13/20
Opens: TBD 2020
The idea is a clever one, one of monstrous people acting out the only partially buried grief of a couple in a Swedish tale of horror and torment. This pic, however, does not involve mass killings or aliens emerging from bodies. It’s more grown-up tale, though remember that the fairy stories targeted to children have motifs of terror. Still, a clever idea does not always make for an entertaining film even if the performers play their parts dutifully. The rip-off from “Groundhog Day” goes on too many times with too few variations. Remember that the masterwork “Groundhog Day” does not simply repeat scenes daily but shows the principal character played by Bill Murray as one who grows with past knowledge, as when he starts out as a beginner in piano and winds up a dazzling jazz pianist.
Writer-director Jonahnnes Nyholm, whose “The Giant” looks at an autistic man who enters a fantasy world where he is a giant indulges his own fantasies in his full-length sophomore narrative feature, but the picture as a whole may test your patience. Maja (Katarina Jacobson) dies on her eighth birthday from a severe allergic reactions after eating mussels while on vacation with her parents, Tobias (Leif edlund Johansson) and Elin (Ylva Gallon). Mom, who consumes the fish likewise, becomes ill but survives though neither parent has been able to let go of grief. The vacation, which allows them to take in a show at a restaurant featuring two clowns (Stine Bruun and Martin Knudsen) is hardly compensation for what befalls the family, then indulging in bunny make-up, greasepaint that will turn up three years later in a different form while mom and dad go on a camping trip.
Strangely the couple sets up a tent in an isolated forest area rather than on camping grounds, a choice that could and does leave them open to be victimized by criminals and madmen. Sure enough Mog (Peter Belli), a dapper man with a bowler hat, a huge Andre (Morad Khatchadorian), and Cherry (Brandy Litmanen), looking like an escapee from a Charles Addams cartoon in New Yorker magazine, pop up by the couples’ tent, toying with the duo before inflicting their punishments on them. Those intruders are representations of their pictures on Maja’s music box, but they are no longer like the painted, cheerful people singing something like “Zip-a-dee-doo da,” The trio are not looking for money but are psychos who enable one another—Cherry carries the gun, Andre a club and his own muscular body, and Mog the master of ceremonies who in one scene sings “Koko-di, Koko-da,” directs the torture.
Good so far. But when the scene is repeated again, then again, with only a few changes of behavior, that’s where the aforementioned patience trial kicks in. The one comic element is the sight of Tobias, having been warned by fantasies of Mog and company, racing out of the tent in his underwear, yanking his wife Elin into the car to escape from the evil trio.
Now and then the scene fades to a series of animations of bunnies, principally, an obvious reminder of what the poor eight-year-old may have loved but can do so no longer. Perhaps the writer-director would have been ahead of the game if he restricted the running time to that of his previous shorts, “Dreams from the Woods” (8 minutes) and “Puppetboy” (27 minutes). What grief. In Swedish with English subtitles.
86 minutes. © 2020 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C-
Acting – C+
Technical – C
Overall – C