Celia (1989)

directed by Ann Turner

Australia

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I was planning to watch this on Christmas because it takes place around Christmastime, but it didn't work out that way and I don't really regret it because there's basically nothing Christmas-related in this film and I'm pretty sure Christmas is only mentioned in order to establish that the film is set during the summer. I got a projector for Christmas and spent the night in the living room watching bad holiday movies. That's your personal anecdote for the month, have fun with it.

I expected this to be much more of a horror movie, but it's the kind of film where the horror is experienced from a child's perspective, and so, while the imagery used in this case is still pretty creepy (those Hobyahs were awful), horror is part and parcel of the experience of being a child, rather than a separate motif of something terrorizing the child. What this movie is really about is how the worlds of children and the worlds of adults are often totally incompatible and incomprehensible to each other. The title character is a nine-year-old girl who actually has a relatively normal childhood insofar as any childhood can be called "normal", with all of life's mysteries still yet to be revealed as mundane and all the adults in her life doing things that seem incredibly unfair. She very much has her own view of the world, and again, none of the adults around her seem to realize that she's her own person operating according to her own method of living life. A lot of adults treat children as if they're tiny adults intentionally misbehaving instead of people who have their own ideas and conceptions of reality.

A really good example of this is the way the film deals with politics. A running theme is the ruling by the then-PM of Australia that all rabbits, including those belonging to children as pets, are to be rounded up and killed as they are considered vermin. Celia has to deal with this despite not having the capacity to understand it the way adults do. At one point she draws devil features on a picture of the PM in class and is told off for it by the teacher. While the adults view this as extremely disrespectful, they don't see that Celia is interpreting the PM's actions according to the rules of engagement that govern her and her peers: it does not follow that this man should be above recourse, he's a stranger who is telling Celia that her beloved pet is to be surrendered and killed, what is she supposed to do? Celia has no idea of politics or the concept of respecting someone solely based on their office- she treats him the same way she treats her group of friends.

Another running theme is the adults around Celia attempting to force her into cutting off relationships based on their fears of communism. Celia also deals with this the same way she'd deal with a contemporary: you tell me they're communists, and that they're bad people, but they've never hurt me or my friends, and they're always kind to me, so how can they be bad people just because you say they are? The logic the adults follow is the strange stuff here, not what Celia does- the fallacy of shunning some people because of their beliefs and blindly following the rule of others even more distantly removed simply because they hold the highest office in the land is presented as a more childish belief than the rituals and games Celia involves herself with.

The way Celia's most heinous act (not spoiling it) is dealt with is also interesting because I think a lot of other movies would make that the thing that ends the film. They wouldn't show, afterwards, her doing something else that could have ended in a similarly disastrous fashion, but didn't. They would make it a black-and-white issue- as soon as Celia did that, she would have been established as in the wrong. But the mock hanging of her friend afterwards shows that the balance between life and death, justice and injustice, and the definition of what is and isn't a violent act does not hold constant between the worldviews of children and those of adults. It doesn't cast judgement on Celia for what she did or place blame on the people in her life for not teaching her right- it presents her as someone with agency who made a logical choice according to the way she understood justice and reciprocity. I very much enjoyed this movie and despite it not turning out to be what I'd call horror I thought it was one of the better films to explore the unique anxiety of being a child.

3615 Code Père Noël (1989)

directed by René Manzor

France

87 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to seeing this because it had been eluding me for a while, and to my understanding it's kind of a cult classic in some circles. In all honesty, though, I don't... really know how I feel about it? I guess it's my fault for not looking into it further because I may have realized, if I had, that it's not my kind of movie, but I was left with such a weird taste in my mouth after watching it that I'm conflicted about whether or not I actually liked it.

This movie is just so tonally weird that it was hard for me to be comfortable with it. I still don't know if it was intended to be played straight or if it was meant as a very dark comedy, or some kind of bizarre mixture of both. The plot is basically that a little boy, alone with his ailing grandpa in an absurdly massive and complex house built by the riches of his family's toy company, is assaulted by a lunatic dressed up as Santa Claus, and must summon all of his combat skills- gleaned from playing war with his dog- to root out and kill the intruder before the intruder kills him (and his grandpa). That could be funny, I guess, but it's so genuinely sinister in this instance that it makes me really baffled to see so many glowing reviews saying that the kid is badass and the film is awesome. Like... but he was in mortal danger from a murderous pedophile the whole time? And he's depicted being absolutely terrified and losing his childhood while in constant fear for his life? That's... badass? Really?

Writing this all out makes me feel like I'm coming off as the biggest wuss on Earth. I can't help it if I object to seeing a child terrorized for an hour and a half. "But Home Alone!" you might say. The difference between that movie and this one is that Home Alone is so clearly a comedy that you can't mistake it for anything else: seeing a small child beat two comically inept criminals is funny because it doesn't feel like he's ever genuinely threatened, and also, crucially, the criminals don't care about Kevin on a personal level because of his being a small boy. Code Père Noël just goes too far. There's so many different tones in this that, like I said, I have no idea what it was going for. You can't really mix together a sicko dressing up as Santa so he can stroke little girls' faces, a boy running around the house playing games with his dog, the same boy carrying his dead dog while a weird song about becoming a man plays in the background, and the dreamlike, just slightly out-of-proportion house he lives in. None of those things make a movie that makes sense when you throw them in together, it just creates this weird mess that doesn't come off funny or serious but a distinctly uncomfortable vibe all, unfortunately, its own.

I guess I didn't hate this, because it's fun from a visual standpoint- the house that most of the film takes place in is so labyrinthine and full of over-the-top Rich People Stuff that it makes for a really cool set. There's a secret room in the basement crammed full of random toys that are implied to have been discarded by every previous generation to ever live in the house when they were bored with them, and that's just... normal I guess. The lead kid has the most intense mullet I've ever seen on a young child and he's a frighteningly good actor at times, especially in the final scene where that haunted look in his eyes both cemented the fact that this movie gives me the willies and the fact that the kid did an excellent job in an uncomfortable role. I think I was just expecting something fun out of this, and maybe I don't have a sense of humor, but I don't find it particularly fun to watch somebody try to kill a child. Again, Home Alone makes it very clear that the power imbalance is tipped in favor of the child, and the criminals are way more bumbling and silly than threatening. The villain in Père Noël is too much. Apparently the filmmakers either sued or considered suing the filmmakers of Home Alone for stealing their idea, and I'm the very last person to defend English-language remakes of anything, but in this case, I think the Home Alone creators were right in thinking that a version of this film that's less stomach-turning would make for a much more enjoyable experience overall.

I apologize that this isn't the most positive review to post for my Christmas """special""", but I haven't been watching a lot of Christmas movies lately, and the ones I have, I haven't been reviewing. I've seen some truly stand-out films this month- just not holiday ones. If there are any humans out there reading this, I wish you all the merriest holiday possible. 2021 is gonna be our year if we have to take it by storm.

Hosts (2020)

directed by Richard Oakes, Adam Leader

UK

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Oh boy I loved this movie. I totally didn't expect to. Each year when winter rolls around and I turn my eyes towards the crop of new holiday horror movies, I do not expect them to be good; if I can get a laugh out of them, that's great, but more likely they're just slop on the pile of really, really bad holiday-themed horror movies and that's that. This is where I was coming from when I started to watch Hosts, and I got completely blindsided by a movie that was genuinely disturbing, a gut-punch in various ways. If this was not set at Christmastime I would still have thought it was a brilliant movie, but Christmas provides some context for the events of the film that is important in two ways, one of which I'll get into now and one I'll talk about later.

So one of the many things this film is good at is creating characters who you really don't want to see die (and then killing them, of course). It is extremely heavy on the familial love and some romantic love as well, and if you're particularly jaded about that it could definitely feel cloying, but to me the performances were authentic enough that it didn't bother me how hard the film seemed to be emphasizing the bonds between its characters. We don't spend a lot of time with the couple who will eventually become the antagonists, but their little gift exchange on the couch together is enough to establish a warm feeling towards them; they come off like a young couple genuinely in love and then something happens very suddenly that I won't spoil, but that made me realize I was in for something better than the cut-rate holiday slasher with some possibly demonic twists that I expected. If you've seen this, I think you know what scene I'm talking about. I did not expect the possession to look like that. I've never seen possession look like that.

Another really interesting thing this does is tell us that the things happening are happening everywhere else too, outside of the scope of the film. Await Further Instructions, a movie I recently rewatched that cemented my opinion on it being one of my favorite horror movies of the past five years, also does this. The hints from scenes where characters are watching the news that they are only a random couple of victims in something that's turning into a country-wide phenomenon makes everything feel much more hopeless.

There are other elements that are used in the development of the film's villains that make them both interesting and genuinely terrifying, and this is the other thing I mentioned earlier that hinges on this being a Christmas movie. A really common theme in Christmas horror is for the villain or villains to kind of represent an anti-consumerist mindset- maybe it'll be somebody who's traumatized by Santa and fed up with the empty commercialization of the holiday, or maybe it'll be Krampus, who, uprooted from his Alpine origins, has become a symbol for those disillusioned with the common Christmas symbols or just not fond of the holiday and wanting to celebrate something more macabre. But each time, when something like that is used, there's always a sort of wink-nudge to the viewer that we're supposed to, on some metaphorical level, sympathize with the villain- after all, the commercialization of Christmas is bad, and everyone is tired of having Christmas music shoved down our gullets. We're not expected to excuse murder in the name of being tired of Salvation Army bell-ringers, but the sentiment is something we can agree with: aren't you just exhausted by all of this? Aren't you tired of people faking charity and togetherness?

However, what Hosts does is use that basic premise (and this is done extremely artfully, only hinted at, never exposition-dumped on us) to construct a backstory for its villains- but it does not make them sympathetic. The implication that the entities that possess the first couple were/are something that existed pre-Christianity, and that they were duped into thinking there would be a place for them within Christianity, only to be driven out and painted as sacrilegious, is something that, in this case, is not presented as a sympathetic backstory. In this case, it makes them bitter, enraged, and fearsome. Despite, again, a lack of direct context, you get the sense that these things are old and very, very angry. It's not funny and ironic when they return, fueled by hatred for the new Christian holidays that subsumed their own worship, it's terrifying, because their power is coupled with an intense desire for revenge that's as illogical and self-absorbed as the fae, gods, and various other entities of old always are.

It's a latecomer, but this is definitely high up on my favorites list of the year. I would happily (well, maybe that's not the right word, as it is quite brutal and violent) watch this any time, not just around the holidays. There is something to be said about the real-life stigmatization of Pagan worship and the way this movie plays into the idea that it's a negative, dangerous thing, but... that's a whole other discussion.

Anything for Jackson (2020)

directed by Justin G. Dyck

Canada

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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First of all, I'm absolutely stunned to find out that the guy who directed this made like 6,000 Hallmark-type Christmas movies and then this. To go from "Baby in a Manger" to "film where some Satanists kidnap a pregnant woman and try to force the soul of their dead grandson into her fetus"? The range!

But anyway. The thing that left the biggest impression on me about this movie was its ability to throw things at me that I completely was not expecting. It has few actual jump scares in the traditional sense of a sudden wham! ghoul-in-your-face moment accompanied by a loud noise, but it's really fond of doing stuff out of nowhere: right from the cold open, where we see two people going about a morning routine that seems totally innocent until they drag in a screaming woman from outside their front door, this movie is great at hiding what's about to happen. There are two other moments I want to highlight where the film does this, and obviously don't read the rest of this paragraph because they only work if you don't expect them. The first is less explosive, and just involves someone sticking their head into a woodchipper unexpectedly, but the second is an extremely sudden gunshot-suicide scene that came after the wood chipper incident and totally caught me off guard, and that's where I knew this movie was doing something unique. To have been able to get me so good again right after the woodchipper incident is, I believe, an indicator of quality. I had to be distracted enough to not anticipate anything, and I had to be unaware that I was being distracted.

On the whole, this is just a really good movie. I didn't expect it to be because the premise sounds so silly. But the thing about it is that it doesn't just adhere to a straight line as far as the plot is concerned, there's several different roadblocks and branching paths brought on by various challenges and hurdles the couple face in the process of doing nefarious stuff with a fetus. I was so surprised by all the twists and turns that kept happening. Also unconventional is that the pregnant woman the couple kidnaps is not really a defining character- this is not a story about her struggle to escape against the odds; the bulk of the film is spent on the Satanist couple and their somewhat misguided efforts to bring their grandson back. I guess the whole gimmick is that the two of them aren't who you expect Satanists to be, and it only works because it's not explained why these two random grandparents happen to practice dark rites in their spare time. Maybe they've always been into it? Maybe they just started out of desperation after their grandson died? The explanation isn't important, just the aesthetic of the most whitebread grandparents ever dressing in black robes and speaking incantations out of a thousand-year-old tome. And it's not even played for laughs- on some level you respect these people and their desperate measures. I still don't like that this implies all Satanists are working to summon forces of evil and hatred into the world, but I guess I can't expect in-depth explorations of Satanism from someone whose bread and butter is movies about, like, surprise weddings and Christmas romance. I'm sorry, I just can't get over that.

This was so good, in fact, that I'm finding trouble saying anything about it other than "this was good". When you like a movie so much after not expecting to like it at all it's kind of hard to examine it in the moment. I'm just impressed by all of it: the aesthetic, the depth of the plot and the way nothing feels predictable, the dialogue, everything. I absolutely loved the ghosts that come up out of the woodwork when the summoning goes haywire. There's such a great mixture of darkness and tension in this, and it's all done in moderation, so it never feels like it goes overboard with the foreboding and becomes unrealistic. Which is strange to say for a movie with a plot like this one's, but that's the whole deal with this- it's realistic, it feels believable. It's just good.

Mister Designer (1987)

directed by Oleg Teptsov

Russia

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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My book club recently discussed the Strugatsky brothers' "Roadside Picnic", and a lot of us remarked on how the book seemed to us like it never spoke directly about anything, always dancing around statements instead of saying them outright. I figured this was a specific quirk of the translation, but it made me realize that this is actually something I see in practically every Russian film or book I watch/read.

While I was watching Mister Designer, it felt like it made close to no sense at all. The imagery was presented in disjointed scenes that appeared to lack context; vignette-like, carefully staged individual moments that, together, somehow made up 103 minutes of film. But I gradually realized that the plot was there, and it was actually fairly linear and understandable, in contrast to how dreamlike and disconnected the whole film feels. This is a visual language that I am not familiar with but am very interested in, being as different as it is from anything I'm used to: instead of presenting us with a narrative told like a book, with a beginning, middle, and end, Mister Designer- and a lot of other Russian fiction as well- conveys the story in broader strokes, like it's being told by associations. Telling us about one event involves telling us about the events leading up to it and the events that happened afterwards, not simply informing us of the event itself. What at first appeared as a lack of context is, actually, a film composed of almost nothing but context.

So far as I can tell, Mister Designer is actually a potent horror story, though it may at first glance appear so arty that it defies genre. The protagonist is a well-known artist who creates mannequins that he aims to make more and more lifelike, and there's an element of playing God to it, an element of mortality that the artist is forever trying to escape. There's something real-life disturbing about this that I do have to mention- it's really uncomfortable in how it depicts a very young girl; while the artist's fixation on her is never directly sexual, she's still shown with no shirt on and cast as a figure who is, if not sexual, than definitely sensual, far more than a girl who is said to be fourteen- and acknowledged outright by other characters as a child- should ever be. The actress was seventeen at the time, which is... still extremely creepy, considering every man in the film appears well over forty. This fits with the persona of the artist; he definitely feels like the kind of slightly unwholesome character who would develop an obsession with a young girl that would ultimately lead to his downfall, but unfortunately the film doesn't play out that way. The girl is without a doubt evil, it's not the artist's own disgusting tastes eventually working against him. It's the girl's fault and her power that fulfills the artist's fear of mortality.

It really is unfortunate that this girl was way too young for her role, because she's the most interesting and enigmatic part of the film's story. I wish she'd been played by someone of age so it didn't feel so genuinely creepy. She's implied to be some kind of immortal being- again, this isn't outright stated but is revealed with agonizing slowness and subtle hints- and her presence throughout Mister Designer makes it deeply haunting and strange. Her real identity and the extent of her powers is never elaborated upon, and she feels like an entity that the protagonist just happened to stumble upon, something that would have moved through the world unseen had he not disturbed her with his hubristic search for eternal life.

I'm interested in seeking out the original story by Alexander Grin to see if it makes more clear the things that this film deals with so indirectly. It's absolutely gorgeous, full of that early-20th-century Russian opulence and a weirdly unfitting synth-opera hybrid soundtrack, and the oddities of the acting and dialogue just make the whole thing feel more dreamlike. I still can't make heads or tails of a lot of this but I did get the sense that it was more purposeful than it might initially seem.

The Vigil (2019)

directed by Keith Thomas

USA

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This caught my eye because as far as I'm aware there are few entirely Jewish horror films, especially not relatively mainstream ones like this (it's produced by Blumhouse). 2020 seems to have dealt it a hard blow as far as actually getting a widespread release is concerned, as is the case with almost every movie intended to come out this year, but it is out, in some capacity at least. The primary complaint I kept seeing in reviews was that this film relies too heavily on jump scares and atmosphere, but really, that just made me want to see it more. I don't always hate jump scares, honestly. Sometimes it's fun to be startled, you know? That's half of why I watch horror in the first place. And combined with a heavy, oppressive atmosphere is kind of the only way jump scares can ever feel appropriate- they only really bug me when they're used cheaply, just out of nowhere in broad daylight.

Up front I should mention that I don't know much of anything about Orthodox Judaism, and as such if anything about The Vigil is heavily offensive it was lost on me. It didn't help at all that I didn't anticipate how much of the dialogue would be in Yiddish, and I couldn't find subtitles for it. The main character is conflicted about his religion, having left his community after a tragedy, and now attends a support group for others who have also fallen out of their respective circles. I don't think this is framed as implying that Orthodox Judaism is at all bad- just that some people eventually leave because it doesn't fit with their lives, which happens in pretty much every religion, and if no one had that option of leaving, it would be serious cause for concern. The main character has deep-seated issues around his religion and his past, and Dave Davis does a startlingly good job portraying him. This movie wouldn't have been half of what it was had he not been in the lead role. He is so convincing in the way he shows emotion and reacts to his situation that I really just felt an overwhelming desire for him to get a hug and some therapy. At no point does anything this movie deals with feel like it was handled clumsily or rushed or brushed over. It's an extremely heavy film. Far heavier than most Blumhouse offerings.

One of my favorite niche sub-sub-subgenres of horror is films where someone has to spend one night guarding a corpse. Anybody who has seen Viy should know that this situation can get creepy really fast. I'm not going to compare Viy to this because the act of staying with a body overnight is a distinctly Jewish practice in this case, so the two films are coming from different backgrounds, but they're similar in the plain fact that they involve a person alone with a body and a mysterious, malevolent force. I could add The Autopsy of Jane Doe to this grouping of films as well, although, again, not specifically a Jewish film. The important thing with these films is that everything takes place over the course of one harrowing night, and whether for good or bad, when the sun rises the next morning, the events of the previous night are thrown into a new light- in this case, far more complicated than "good or bad".

I can see why a lot of people might get bored by The Vigil and see it as an aimless build-up of dread punctuated by some jump scares here and there, and I can even agree with small parts of that statement, because it does take a while to feel like anything is actually going on, but the last 20-30 minutes are phenomenal. The way the demon is handled is amazing. It is genuinely one of the most unnerving and actually forceful-feeling demons I've seen in a recent horror movie. You don't see it too much but its presence when it's onscreen is intensely disquieting but always visually ambiguous; the way the main character describes it as "blurry" at one point really sums it up. It does do other generic demon things like imitate people to confuse the protagonist, but when it's best is actually when it's onscreen, in contrast to a lot of other ghouls & goblins of the horror genre- it just looks so creepy, it looks like there's something wrong with it; at one point when the protagonist is toe-to-toe with it its face changes into this incredibly bizarre beaked thing for a split second and I wish I had gone back and paused it right on that image because that design was unlike anything I've seen. I just loved the way this thing looked. Again, that last half-hour is perfect horror cinema as far as I'm concerned. I don't feel like this overuses jump scares, and again, they fit with the sinister atmosphere when they are used. I can't say this is far and away the best horror film of the year but it is one of the most unique and I enjoyed watching it very much.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

directed by Panos Cosmatos

Canada

110 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I don't think I got this the first time I watched it because I was still under the pretense that there was something to get. There is a plot here- and I'll get to it in a moment- but it is far and away the least important thing to the viewer when considering how to approach this movie. I'm reminded of the idea that an atom is 99.9999...% empty space, with a nucleus in the middle that's the equivalent size of a pea in the middle of a racetrack. That pea is the plot and the rest of Beyond the Black Rainbow is filled with pure aesthetic. Another thing that made me appreciate this more was watching Mandy. I'm still a much bigger fan of Mandy than I am of this, but now I think I understand how the two are connected, if they're connected at all (and I think they are).

Beyond the Black Rainbow is one of the most aesthetically perfect films I've ever seen, and that's why I love it. I don't love it for the plot or for the acting, I love it because it's an insane, acid-drenched vision of 1970s metaphysical self-help culture turned brainwashing telepathy cult. Vague hints of Cronenberg crop up here and there, but for the most part this is its own beast. If you go into it expecting to understand on the first watch or even on the second, you'll be disappointed, not because it's too dense to parse but because it's just not that deep. I'm gonna try to lay it all out here as best I can figure it out, mostly for my own benefit:

Sometime in the 1960s a quack psychiatrist founded a phony institute based on generic claims of energy healing and being your best self and whatnot, only he was tapped into some truly weird stuff instead of just multi-level marketing like most of these things are. His "son" (none of the familial relationships in this film are ever elaborated upon, I'm just filling in the blanks with what I believe) underwent some kind of bizarre experiment that may have involved dunking himself bodily in a pit of LSD. He came back from this twisted and had a child (again, it is not stated that Elena is the doctor's child, but I think she was), possibly with his own mother, who he also gave this LSD baptism to, but it rendered her nearly catatonic instead of driving her malevolently insane like the doctor. An adolescent, she's now being held captive, either drugged to the gills or actually disabled, inside the labyrinthine institute.

While this is very similar to Mandy in a lot of ways, it has something that Mandy doesn't in that there's sort of a good vs. evil narrative going on here. Another undertone that is extremely faint but is intertwined with the whole kooky self-help cult vibe is neoliberalism, Reaganism, capitalism, that kind of thing. I think the doctor ended up so hateful and violent because he was brought up in an environment where America was rapidly becoming isolationist, and so his experiments with psychic power and psychedelic drugs lead him to obsess over power and control. Elena, raised in captivity and indoctrinated with her powers as an infant, never had that exposure to an outside world and culture. So she was able to manifest a "pure" psychic power that the doctor never managed to gain. Her as a pure good, him as a corrupted evil.

And returning to the acting... Michael Rogers is doing something in this movie, I have no idea if he's doing it on purpose or not, but it's definitely something. It is no surprise that Panos Cosmatos got Nicolas Cage to be in Mandy because both his character and Rogers' in this film have the same essence about them. Like they're doing something totally different to everybody and everything around them. I have seen Michael Rogers in other movies since this and I think he is actually just a bad actor. But somehow that works for this film.

It's really hard to describe Panos Cosmatos' distinct style because it's something that you have to either completely give yourself over to or you won't have a good time. If you're constantly trying to figure things out and ridicule what is unrealistic, it takes you away from experiencing the film as one whole. You just gotta get into the rhythm of it, that's the only way I can describe it. It rolls over you. You don't need to understand. You only need to be shown. Image without context. Hidden meaning. This could have gone on for another hour and I wouldn't have felt bored watching it.

Koko-di Koko-da (2019)

directed by Johannes Nyholm

Sweden/Denmark

86 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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The only really comprehensible thing about this movie is the beginning. It starts off with the sudden and unexpected death of the main couple's young daughter on the eve of her birthday, and the next time we see them is three years later, still together but with a lot of unresolved issues. The grief and lack of communication between the two is what sets up the whole film following the initial death, and from there it slides further and further into inexplicable fantasy. I feel like I'm going to look extremely foolish if I talk about anything that happens in this movie as if it was meant to be taken 100% literally, because describing it to an outsider, it sounds like it's so obviously absurd and intended as metaphor that no one could ever take it seriously. But I just can't figure out what was going on with this, and that's why it's so deeply unsettling, it never allows you to get comfortable and imagine that you know what's going to happen next, or lets you say "aha, so this was the way it really went". Maybe everything really happened, maybe it didn't, but it doesn't really matter in the end what may have genuinely happened.

The couple is accosted by a trio of bizarre characters: A huge man in suspenders carrying a dead dog, a tall woman with a living, aggressive dog on a leash, and a short, older man whistling a tune that seems to be some kind of nursery rhyme (I'm unfamiliar with Swedish nursery rhymes, so fill me in if this is incorrect). They assault the woman, then sic the dog on the man. Then the man wakes up, realizes it was something halfway between a dream and a premonition, tries to escape, and it all happens over and over again. Something always happens to suck them back into the same loop of violence and humiliation- it's just this black hole of inevitability, and somehow the three mysterious assailants become far more terrifying in their inscrutability than any shadowy demon figure from any mainstream horror film. Metaphor or reality, they are some kind of manifestation or representation of extreme negative energy, whether just happening to exist that way of their own accord or having been summoned up- as I believe was the case- as a physical representation of the couple's unresolved grief. The first time they stalked onto the screen, even without knowing what would come next, I just felt this dread at the sight of them- that's what this movie does, it creates a deep-seated dread and anxiety in you because you know something horrible is about to happen and it won't make sense or have a clean resolution or way out.

That's the whole thing with this: the senselessness. It begins with the random act of the daughter's death, the terror that something so unjust could happen without warning, without reason, and it takes that injustice to an illogical extreme. What if people came out of the woods and assaulted my wife? What if they were creatures from a weird fairytale? What if they were led by a jolly, cavorting imp who laughs as he coaxes a girl to shoot me in the balls and releases a slavering dog into the tent where my wife is? These trains of thought are bizarre and nonsensical, but they mirror the nonsense that everyday life is, and once something happens to you that's as unexpected and horrifying as the death of your child, I think a part of you just goes sure, whatever, if this could happen, so could anything. I think that's where Koko-di Koko-da comes from, as a concept.

There's also an interstitial sequence filmed as a shadow puppet play (or made to look like one) that is absolutely devastating. Like I said, nothing about this maps 1:1 onto recognizable real life events; you can't really point at things and go "this means that, that means this". It all just keeps coming in an onslaught of bizarre meaningless violence. And speaking of "violence", I think this movie is more effective because it does not overuse blood and gore. There is a sadistic, sickening glee in the way the three strangers set upon the couple, but it's not the sadism of a Saw film, because it's not inventive, it's the same sequence of actions over and over: catch the wife while she's vulnerable, play with her while the husband watches, set the dog on one of them, aim the gun, wake up. I can't define what exactly is so unsettling about this film, but it's one of the most unsettling films I've seen in a while and will probably stick with me forever now even though I don't really want it to. I think it has a good ending but honestly I don't even know.