Koko-di Koko-da

• The title and the antagonists' theme come from the old Swedish nursery rhyme 'Var tupp ar dod' ('Our rooster is dead'), itself descended from the French lullaby 'Le coq est mort.' Mog, the white-suited showman, whistles and sings the dirge about the bird that will never crow 'koko-di koko-da' again, weaponizing a children's song into the loop's reset trigger.
• The trio of tormentors aren't invented for the woods - they're lifted straight off an antique spinning music box that eight-year-old Maja gets for her birthday and stares at through a shop window in the opening, painted as three quaint nursery characters before they step off the box and into the nightmare.
• Director Johannes Nyholm wrote, directed, and produced the film, and has said it sprang from his own worst fear - losing a child; he cited the Eastern European folk-tale and animation tradition of Jan Svankmajer, Jaromil Jires, and Yuri Norstein as touchstones.
• Nyholm punctuates the live-action cruelty with hand-crafted shadow-puppet interludes of a rabbit family burying their baby; he added them deliberately, calling them a goodnight story or lullaby to the audience so the film wasn't so cruel and offered a sliver of hope.
• It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 2019 - a Swedish-Danish co-production from Johannes Nyholm Produktion, Film i Vast, and Beofilm - and carries an 80% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.
• It was Nyholm's second feature, following 2016's The Giant; the white-suited ringmaster Mog is played by Danish rock veteran Peter Belli.

The loop isn't supernatural, it's the inside of a single grief-frozen mind. Maja dies in the opening medical emergency, and everything after is Tobias and Elin stuck replaying the morning they couldn't save her, the tormentors a self-punishment engine that only releases them once one of them stops fleeing and accepts the loss.

The music-box trio are the dead daughter's imagination made flesh. Maja last looked at them with childlike wonder; that they return as her parents' executioners suggests the loop is her unfinished birthday, the celebration that never happened souring into the only ritual the family has left.

The shadow-puppet bunnies are the film's real ending, not the human one. The animated family buries their baby and goes on; the live-action couple can't, which is the whole point. The puppets show the healthy version of grief the parents keep failing to reach, the lullaby the loop is trying to teach them.

A Swedish couple's eight-year-old daughter, Maja, dies on her birthday from a shellfish allergy during a seaside vacation, and three years of unspoken blame curdles into a camping trip nobody wanted to take. Then the woods start repeating. A white-suited ringmaster, a hulking brute, and a witchy woman with a vicious bull terrier emerge at dawn to torment, humiliate, and kill the pair, over and over, the loop resetting each time to that same whistled nursery tune. Johannes Nyholm stages grief not as sorrow but as a sadistic carousel that won't stop turning until somebody finally looks at it.