This very unusually named film is a Swedish-Danish co-production and apparently uses both languages but of course I wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s a horror film with a strong dose of absurdist fantasy and that means that many elements in it are just inexplicable. At its core though is a time loop phenomenon and it is clever to incorporate this into a horror story. Unfortunately over-exposure to time loop stories seem to have gotten me stuck in a rationalistic mindset when considering them and as such I have difficulty finding this film to be at all scary.

A prologue details Swedish couple Tobias and Elin on a trip with their daughter Maja. After Maja gets a music box as a gift, Elin gets a severe allergic reaction to the shellfish she eats. At the hospital, Maja suddenly dies overnight for no discernible reason and the couple is distraught. Three years later they are still together but unhappily so and they argue incessantly on their camping trip. Tobias insists on setting up camp in an arbitrarily chosen spot despite Elin’s misgivings. The next morning Elin needs to pee and leaves the tent. Outside she is confronted by a trio of strange characters and a dog who look like they came straight out of a nursery rhyme. After toying with her, they kill her while the leader of the group, who has a walking stick and wears a hat and a bow tie, sings the song from the music box long ago. Tobias watches in horror from the tent but is soon discovered and killed himself. Yet he wakes up again when Elin tells him she needs to pee and so the time loop repeats itself with Tobias seemingly as the only person who can remember what happened.

It’s only a matter of time before someone thinks to make a horror time-loop film and this is a fairly well executed one. The use of nursery rhyme characters adds to the creepiness and the Koko-di Koko-da song from the music box makes for an appropriate leitmotif for the attacks. Still while the strange characters are creepy, it’s not as if they exhibit any supernatural powers and even Tobias discovers that he can hurt them when he tries. That makes it hard for me to actually be very scared. There’s is some attempt to link these attacks to the couple’s grief over losing the child and I did like the shadow play they used to try and get that across. But ultimately nothing is explained and the link feels rather nebulous. You get a sense of what director Johannes Nyholm is striving to establish but without some causal explanation of why this is happening or why Tobias is the only seemingly able to remember past loops, it just doesn’t go anywhere.

Then again perhaps this film never had much of a chance with me in the first place. I read a lot of online fiction and time loops are one of the most common types of stories in this area. Most such stories eventually become an exercise in intellectual problem-solving. You can even see that in this film. At first Tobias is shocked to inaction by the horror but then as he experiences more loops, he tries different courses of action to see what works. I’ve written about the film Palm Springs before and that serves as a perfect example of how these stories tend to go, from shock and disbelief, to apathy and if the protagonist is determined enough to systematic problem solving. The problem is that this isn’t really conducive to horror. The weirdos here are creepy and perhaps scary when you encounter them at first. But if Tobias keeps having to deal with them over hundreds of iterations, it’s likely that he would lose any fear he had of them and become an incredible expert at swiftly dispatching them. I therefore argue that for true time loop horror, both the protagonist and the antagonists must remember the loops. The protagonist can keep trying new things but the enemies remember and learn too and so can still get you every time until at last you give up and let them whatever they want to you, over and over again.

Anyway I give kudos to the makers of this film for trying something relatively new and they do at least get the aesthetics right. But the end result still isn’t anything that I could call a success except at the most superficial level so I can’t really recommend this one.