Stop, Collaborate and Listen: Koko-di Koko-da and the Horrors of Miscommunication
Note: this contains spoilers for Koko-di Koko-da
The film opens with a spinning music box. We see smiling, whistling figurers parading endlessly, once they’ve come to the end they’re at the beginning again.
Grief, the loss of a child, can make starting a relationship over hard, but a never-ending loop of torment, humiliation and pain makes it even harder. Johannes Nyholm blends surrealism with fantasy, psychological horror and drama in pandemic-delayed cinema release, Koko-di Koko-da (2019). The result is a nightmarish fable as we follow a couple, Elin (Ylva Gallon) and Tobias (Leif Edlund), on a camping trip, trying to reconcile but end up reliving unspeakable horrors (not just camping related things like mosquitoes and the lack of indoor plumbing) over and over again at the hands of three forest-dwelling creeps. Tobias and Elin have a fundamental problem when it comes to their relationship: they’re not on the same page. The cliché of men wanting to take action and women wanting to fix a problem by talking it through plays out in this film fable.
Fables focus on moral lessons through storytelling, so what moral lesson should we take from Koko-Di KoKo-Da? I think it’s about listening and communicating.
Three years after the sudden death of their daughter Maja (Katarina Jakobson), they go camping. Neither seem particularly keen to go but Tobias wants to reconcile and feels the camping trip will help. His idea of fixing is to be proactive and to do something, even if they won’t enjoy themselves. Elin feels Tobias doesn’t listen to her and things are now extremely strained.
This isn’t new in their relationship; it’s merely amplified by their grief. Early on in the film, after Elin is hospitalised from a severe allergic reaction to shellfish, in the middle of the night, under a makeshift tent, Tobias shows Elin photos of how she looked, swollen and red. We learn a lot about the couple from this scene; Tobias says that if it had been him, he would have been scared stiff – which is precisely what happens the first time he is later faced with a life-threatening situation. Elin responds that she wasn’t worried until she saw his reaction, and then she freaked out. She tells him how he could have toned it down and that his reaction made her feel nervous. Though he explains that he panicked, she says he should have kept his cool, but Elin doesn’t get to finish making her point before Tobias reverts to making jokes, and clearly isn’t listening.
This dynamic continues as the pair embark upon their car journey, illustrating the issues in their relationship. Tobias gets the wrong flavour ice cream for Elin, which, on the surface, doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is symptomatic of his lack of listening to what she asks for. This leads to an argument about how he didn’t pack her swimsuit. The argument isn’t really about swimsuits or ice creams but Tobias takes it at surface level. Wanting to do something, to act, Tobias suggests turning around and returning her ice-cream. He’s only joking, though, as his idea for action is already too late – Elin has started eating the ice-cream he bought her. They continue to bicker until Tobias, mid-argument, states that he loves her. This stops the argument and both fall silent. While arguing can be unpleasant, it at least serves the purpose of each party being able to say how they feel. The silence after his “I love you” is heavy and awkward. To Elin, the “I love you” makes it hard for her to continue to express herself and the frustration she’s feeling. For Tobias, he is trying to be active in stopping the argument, even if that means stopping communication.
When their daughter died, as a result of a delayed allergic reaction, the tragedy was two-fold, made worse when we remember Elin earlier telling a medic that Maja also ate the ‘funny’ shellfish. Had anyone listened, the catalyst to this tale might not have occurred. And delayed reaction becomes a recurring narrative motif. Elin pleads with Tobias to stop at a B&B instead of a campsite. However, that’s not the plan and Tobias isn’t willing to change it. Fixed in his idea of what will help, they argue more until he ends up coming off the road altogether and they camp in a field.
This sets up a space for the film’s Groundhog Day style of repeating events, where Tobias is in control and Elin is kept out of the infinite loop-loop. She has no idea Tobias has lived this nightmare before. And even he only seems to remember the sense of dread and that something is wrong; the specifics of past events seem just out of reach. I think this is a really striking choice. In the titular Groundhog Day (1993) Bill Murray is able to better himself by knowing exactly how things will play out, using accumulated knowledge to his advantage. Tobias, however, isn’t afforded this clarity, so it’s up to him to figure out, through action rather than cognition, how to save himself and Elin. He’s provided the opportunity to have a do over, but, he needs to make wise choices, and make them he does not.
Increasingly evident is that he doesn’t know how to effectively communicate to Elin that something is wrong. Each time the loop resets, he is more panicked and erratic than the last time. Returning to the hospital bed scene from three years earlier, I wonder if he’d listened to Elin when she told him to keep his cool if that would have been enough to break this cycle? Instead, we watch Tobias flit from abandoning Elin to physically and emotionally dragging her through trauma, as he doesn’t have the words to explain what he’s experiencing or know how to communicate with her so she’ll understand.
Towards the end of the film, in one of the resets, Elin goes to wake Tobias up only to find she is alone. He’s abandoned her. Outside, it’s snowed. This is the first time we’ve seen snow in any of the resets. Considering they were eating ice cream earlier and that Elin wanted to bring her swimsuit, it’s unlikely they choose to go camping in winter. Here I think the snow represents that going it alone can be even colder. Though it could be interpreted in different ways - colder being they’ve grown apart - I’m still rooting for them despite their troubles. There was warmth between them in the beginning. I want them to be able to solve their issues and come together.
The scene continues and we follow Elin in a beautiful long shot to their car, Tobias is still nowhere to be found. After attempting to get it started again, she spots a cat she’d seen when they first arrived. The cat leads her in an almost dreamlike sequence to a house. Inside is a red velvet curtain lit with candles and a seat for one. Gorgeous shadow puppetry plays out a bunny rabbit version of their past trauma. What initially might have seemed like a random attack on the couple by three creeps takes on deeper meaning. They chose the couple; they know them intimately enough to know they suffered the loss of a child. Their delight in tormenting them isn’t just coincidence and that they happened upon them. As in many fables, happy endings aren’t always a given and our heroes don’t always learn the moral of the tale.
In the final reset, Tobias and Elin are able to drive away. We see that Elin has wet herself and it’s assumed Tobias wouldn’t stop for her. When he previously did, the creeps caught up with them. Now, they silently sit in the car, driving away, hoping that they have left the horror behind them. But they’re still not communicating, and suddenly they hit a dog causing them to swerve into a bog. They’re stuck. But then, they’ve been stuck for a long time. They have a moment where they are able to embrace. Forgiveness seems possible as they share a kiss. Finally, the camera pulls back in the style it has done at the end of every reset before it, indicating that there’ll be another one as soon as the creeps catch up. Those ‘creeps’ represent the relentlessness that grief can have if left to fester. So much like the strange music box that Maja coveted at the start of the film - depicting those three creeps - the end is the beginning again. Without communication, any form of action has left them unable to escape the pain. But this is just my reading of the film, and if you prefer action, you don’t have to listen to me.
Alice Taylor-Matthews is on Twitter @alicetaylorm
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