Koko-Di Koko-Da

PICTUREHOUSE

To a distant ear, Johannes Nyholm's Koko-Di Koko-Da might seem like a premise mix-up of Ari Aster's Hereditary and Christopher Landon's Happy Death Day, that uses elements of the two popular horror pieces to tell its derivative story of grief, set in a time-loop.

A watchful eye would know that the film is deeper than its premise. Yes, elements of the aforementioned pieces are present in this feature and do share a heavy relation with the film's forefront scenarios, but if talking thematically, Nyholm's piece couldn't be further away than its supposed inspirations.

Instead of illuminating its horrific themes by using drama, the film uses a reverse process by illuminating dramatic ironies and tragedies through the means of horror. This results in a horror film which mostly — with some noticeable exceptions — shies away from showing gruesome violence in order to focus on the important part of its narrative: character reaction.

Whether it is the comically horrific laughter of Peter Belli's mysterious character Hog or the screams when the characters are subjected to brutal pain, each sound and visual cue relates to the extreme emotions that are not only presented at a surface observation but also at a mental stratosphere of the characters themselves. The scenes that do show gore instead of implying them are the aftermaths of said implied violence. While these aftermath showcases do become disrupting roadblocks to the core psychological experience — something that even the most analysing viewers will find annoying — they are not done without any purpose.

The purpose here is to show the emptiness that typically follows a sudden emotional outbreak. However, the results are evidently mixed, as the viewers are not familiar with such a purpose and would rightly announce these scenes to be a disastrous element of an otherwise great venture, while the ones familiar with such purpose will, at their best, appreciate the purpose without being mesmerized or satisfied with the scene itself.

Regardless of this one drawback — that for all intents and purposes, are necessary to be aware of — there are plenty more positives to talk about.

The first is Nyholm's long, silenced scenes that are used to build a creeping sense of dread. These are not heavily used throughout the film considering how, at a small snap, the film's thematic and literal volume can go from zero to eleven. Whenever these scenes do show up — most evidently in the third act — it is used masterfully to a point that even a sudden appearance of a cat without any audio cue will still make the viewer jump from their seat.

Carrying over this talented aspect is Nyholm's process for building tension. There is a poetic rhythm to his process that, just like a nursery rhyme, is both familiar and odd at each passing line. Every line — or scene — starts off with the leftover rhythm of the previous's endpoint and ends with a word (scenario) that at overview is completely different but in feeling smells familiar to the end-point of the previous one. This process of visual showcasing ends up tying up to its thematic senses of grief, which regardless of context or sources is still, at the end of the day, grief. This philosophical theory is not only evident in its creative aspects, but also in its technical ones.

Tobias Höiem-Flyckt's cinematography — while staying true to the purpose of not showing violence — is still close-up and personal towards its characters and environments, showing every aspect of their emotions. Nyholm's film editing and Gustaf Berger's sound editing, elaborates on Tobias' cinematography by giving the shots an aforementioned rhyming sense with their different-yet-same audio and visual cuts.

Combing the analysis of such technical and creative process makes the brilliance of the film clear, as each and every element — whether big or small — work in such clockwork-like behaviour and in conjunction to each other that it ironically produces an always-forward mentality towards the timings of its presentation. Which, in an even greater sense of irony, the viewer will never be fully aware of due to their investment in the feature itself.