TO SLEEP, NO MORE // A FILM REVIEW OF "KOKO-DI-KOKO-DA"

BY MATEO MORENO

The eerie and unsettling world of KOKO-DI-KOKO-DA successfully makes you feel uncomfortable right from the opening credits, but it also rests on a plot that is best not spoiled. So I won't spoil it here. Instead I'd rather give you the frame work that Swedish filmmaker Johannes Nyholm has crafted. He introduces us into the world of a couple (Leif Edlund and Ylva Gallon) who experience a shattering loss. After they find themselves shadows of what they formerly were, they head off to relax on a trip and end up camping in the woods. The next morning, a creepy group of strangers arrive and set off a chain of events that begin to repeat over and over. Just when they think they might have escaped them, they seem to come back again and again to haunt them. This hell may very well be a type of hell, but it seems as if it's their own personal hell, crafted just for them, and doesn't seem too keen on letting them go.

Nyholm smartly mixes horror with a surreal and twisted almost Brothers Grimm Fairy tale and adds a dash of heartbreaking drama to create a wholly original film. There's a lot of great imagery that may take a second viewing to fully digest, even if the actual story is rather simple. The visuals are strange and hypnotic with a fearful dread always running alongside every moment. By taking the couple's real tragedy and mixing it into this hellish landscape they find themselves in, it creates a horror movie that moves like like a traditional type of horror and more like a bad dream that keeps morphing into something even more sinister. It's filled with twisted and dark elements, not to mention the oddball trio led by a disturbing Peter Belli (his crisp Carnival Barker white suit and cane make him all the more menacing). By the end, after all the darkness has faded from the screen, chances are the hypnotic rhyme of the title won't. KOKO-DI-KOKO-DA...

GRADE: B+

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Johannes Nyholm STARRING Leif Edlund, Ylva Gallon, Peter Belli, Katarina Jakobson, Brandy Litmanen. Now showing in Digital Cinemas. On VOD December 8th.