Cocoon
2026 · 4m
Directed by daixuan
Genres: drama, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Inspired by Edogawa Ranpo's novel A Brute's Love, with a visual direction heavily influenced by Salvador Dalí.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A CalArts student riffing on Ranpo and Dalí should feel like derivative pastiche, but something about the formal restraint here—the refusal to just *show* the surrealism—actually works against expectation; it's almost too controlled for its own subversive good.
Cocoon positions itself deliberately within a lineage of literary adaptation and European surrealism, and the rigor with which daixuan negotiates between Ranpo's psychological darkness and Dalí's visual grammar suggests a filmmaker thinking formally about film history, not just borrowing from it.
The thing that lands is likely the editing—how the cut cadence either embraces or resists the dream logic of the premise—or a single performance choice that makes the surrealism feel earned rather than imposed; at 4 minutes, that one decision is doing all the heavy lifting.