Still from Daixuan’s Cocoon (all screenshots by author)

There’s a certain humor to falling in love with a doll. Seeking pleasure in frightening perfection seems insane! Yet, a doll equivalent could be a person addicted to the needle, injecting themselves until they resemble Magritte’s balloon figure in his 1967 portrait, The Art of Living. All puffed up until they are perfect. So, yes, the idea of falling in love with a doll is hilarious…until you fall victim to their undeniably seamless plastic skin. Not a single pore! Similarly, Her is almost a comedy…until you begin to think fondly of an LLM. No more disagreements that tickle like cockroaches on the temple! Your partner is agreeable and thinks you’re a genius! The WHOLE conversation about falling in love with a non-sentient being is laughable… until you discover the problem is much closer than you would like to admit. This is what 129mlwater, also known as Daixuan, explores in their film Cocoon. The four-minute short, with beautiful kaleidoscope animated imagery, is inspired by Edogawa Ranpo’s short story, A Brute’s Love, two stories that follow this Raggedy Ann horror to its inevitable finale. 

Cocoon opens with a young bride and her therapist as they discuss the beginnings of her marriage, a not-entirely-unpleasant familial arrangement. Our bride imagines her wedding night as the start of a new chapter in a sequence that, with its underbelly of dread, reminded me instantly of Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness. Something’s coming! The couple bites from the same apple to solidify their pact, but the spark between the two is lacking. The bride begins to realize her husband has another life within their guesthouse down the road. His sweet tone hasn’t changed, but all night he is gone! This eats her up inside. What on earth could this man be doing? The clocks create a deafening tune, reminding our bride of her loss, suffocating her in a cocoon of anxieties. Throughout her reflection, we see her isolation encapsulated in a beautiful Dalíesque (one of the creator’s favorite artists) mosaic masterpiece. 

Dalí would be proud!

Our bride’s worried heart, juxtaposed with overwhelming beauty, comes together to create a lavish home whose soul is empty. After many nights of her worst nightmares drowning her in her empty bed, she decides to solve this mystery. She sneaks down the trail and tiptoes to the window, placing her ear to the door. A woman’s laugh. Our protagonist has now come face to face with her worst-case scenario! This climax scene’s imagery is so unbelievably striking that during my initial watch I was forced into a hypnotized silence. We see the interior of our protagonist as our cocoon princess imagines the mistress: a woman as delicate as a butterfly. As her imagination expands, she pictures beautiful stills of the two in love. Sadness and desperation flood the tone. Their plush winged lips embrace each other. Their love is an all-encompassing force that decorates the room in gold. Daixaun perfectly captures the unbelievable betrayal—our protagonist’s devastating discovery whilst the perpetrators of this depression celebrate their joy—and the imagination’s ability to envision our worst nightmare! And to make matters worse, the beautiful couple is peeling an apple. Our bride is beside herself with grief for the man she thought she knew. 

What must this woman look like?? This choir of anxiety pulls our protagonist to sneak into the guest house. She must see this perfect woman!. I particularly love this part of the film as we see the surrealist inspiration Daixuan plays with, like our bride with ants crawling down her face. This imagery teases our tensed jaws as she decides to enter this home away from home. She tiptoes through the entryway. It is dark and abandoned, not resembling a rendezvous room in the slightest. In fact, the journey to the woman is scarier. Our bride’s cocooned body slugs herself to the door. It creaks open, and the butterfly woman sits crooked. To our protagonist’s horror, she is a doll. This moment is layered with a beautiful cover of “Angel Baby,’’ further cementing the insanity of this moment and the bride’s hysteria. Her screwed arms dangle over her plastic legs. Her doll hair, fabulous. Our bride now faces a problem she was not prepared for. Her mind scrambled. The apple peels, falling. Her body, drowning in her pearl tears. In that moment, the dark room turns bright white, as if reflecting the silence that follows her shock. A beat, and then the darkness creeps back in. She has only one thing she must do. Our bride pulls out pliers and gets to work, dismembering the body limb by limb. Daixuan leaned into their artistic talent in this scene, extending the anger felt by our protagonist with our Vitruvian doll—her eyes being gouged out, each limb being carefully plucked until the final act: the decapitation. A kiss of death solidifying the act. 

After this destructive dissection of the doll, she returns to her cozy home. Her husband will thank her for this; she fought for their love! Now they were each other’s alone. As usual, he comes home before leaving for the guest house. Our bride tenses with anticipation as he leaves for his now-dead mistress. Our bride waits… and waits. He does not come back. Is he devastated by the loss of this doll? Then, a gunshot, layered over our continuous ‘‘Angel Baby.” Her husband and the doll, a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, dead by each other’s side. We end the film in our bride’s present day. Her therapist leans back as the story has come to a close. Our bride has finished her retelling, and their session is over. We see her ready to head home, with a child and her doll husband!!!! Well, if this finale isn’t making lemonade out of lemons, I don’t know which ending would be! Our bride is now happy as can be in a canary yellow haze of bourgeois dream! Cheers! 

This is a fantastic addition to the original story, as its full-circle ending made me laugh out loud. I’m proud of our bride!! Daixuan’s film not only creates a beautiful surrealist world, but also uses irony as a tool throughout, and will surely have your creative cortex inspired! 

Francesca Krikorian (she/her) is a film/visual art student at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently working with Filthy Dreams as our social media intern. Her work ranges from highlighting marginalized voices through her 2022 short Hija Callada, to screenplays that tell the story of Ramon Novarro and the construction of his Heterosexual Latin Lover persona through media advertisement. Film analysis on young filmmakers’ work is something she is extremely passionate about, a goal Mincing Movies aims to achieve. She also paints, with art that is a mash of Otto Dix’s disorienting depictions of the body combined with her own alien-like storytelling. So, if you are in need of a fresh new lens portrayal of your fellow human, make sure to check out artof.frann on Instagram!