Director: Carlson Young
Writers: Carlson Young, Pierce Brown
Stars: Udo Kier, Carlson Young, Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw
Synopsis: Decades after the accidental drowning of her twin sister, a self-destructive young woman returns to her family home, finding herself drawn to an alternate dimension where her sister may still be alive.
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Adapting her 2018 short film, Carlson Young’s feature debut The Blazing World very much feels like a short expanded to feature length – there’s no short of stylish and symbolic visuals, but as the film goes on, the overall structure starts to sag. Still, it’s an ambitious effort, signaling a filmmaking talent with no shortage of creative flair, but for the poignant story The Blazing World is trying to tell, it should have a tighter emotional grip on the audience.
Young has said her film is a loose adaptation of the seventeenth-century utopian fiction book of the same name, transcribing Margaret Cavendish’s exploration of a fantasy world onto a story about grief, trauma, and battling your own inner demons. In a nice nod, Young has named her protagonist Margaret, starring herself as a young woman from wealthy parents who became fixated with the possibility of alternate realities after her sister died in a drowning accident while her parents were arguing as a child. As her parents were attending to her sister, Margaret saw her first glimpse of otherworldliness – namely a creepy old man beckoning her to a black-hole-esque portal.
It starts a fascination with metaphysics and astral planes in Margaret, and when we jump ahead to her twenties, she’s half-convinced the reason she feels so disconnected from the world is because she’s stuck in the wrong reality. When she visits her parents (Vinessa Shaw and Dermot Mulroney having a lot of unhinged fun), she regards their clearly broken lives without compassion or pity. Upon exploring her old house, she finds another reality filled with strange lands and distorted reflections of people in her life, on a long, painful road to confronting her trauma around her sister’s death.
Before we delve into the fantasy world, Young builds a palpable sense of unease. She leans into horror by warping Margaret’s reality with hallucinations and dissociations that unsteady the audience, and there are a few scares that feel genuinely chilling. The stellar production design by Rodney Becker adds to the feeling that we’re never quite at home – everything is exaggerated with bright colors brightly (lots of reds and pinks) and plenty of neon. While Margaret’s city apartment feels a bit too over-designed, being messy in a slightly too exact and charming way, in the vast majority of instances it adds to the dreamlike mood of the film. A particularly highlight is a trendy outdoor bar with lights and decking wrapped around a tree, and a stage where Margaret’s friend Margot (Soko) gives a performance that is reminiscent of the Roadhouse segments of Twin Peaks: The Return.
But nothing sets the tone of the film more than the incredible score. Through a combination of strings, keys, and synth, composer Isom Innis builds a creepy yet elegiac and emotionally stirring suite that helps us feel the emotional rush of diving into the unknown. When we first enter the dream world, Innis may directly lift the theme from The Shining, but for the sheer originality in the rest of the music, he gets away with it. The music isn’t exclusively sonically pleasing, it often uses sudden discordant notes on cuts to unsettle and startle the audience. It makes even the most normal moments, a hug between mother and daughter or walking into the kitchen with dirty dishes, feel jarring and dramatic.
It’s unfortunate then that once we delve into the fantasy world, all the polished tension of the first sequences is steadily lost. We find that our world with touches of unacknowledged weirdness is much more interesting than the mystical reality where there are no boundaries or confines. Although the sets are now dressed with wonderful, overgrown detail, it somehow lacks the imagination of the first act, the ability to subtly make environments feel not quite right. It could be argued that Margaret in some way feels more at home in this fantasy world, but it means the dramatic tension is not as present.
The story structure, once we go down this rabbit hole, is, fittingly, much alike Alice in Wonderland, where Margaret is filled in on the rules of her new reality by a white rabbit-esque demon played by Udo Kier, who is as weird as you’d expect from that description. In a pretty relentless exposition drop, we’re told Margaret must retrieve a number of keys in the faint hope she’ll be able to rescue her dead sister from this nightmarish world. We then set off on repetitious and overlong sequences where Margaret meets distorted versions of her broken parents in scenes that lack decent edge or pacing. The endless madness of astral planes is constrained within a familiar fetch quest plot.
It’s not to say the simplistic story is completely devoid of deeper significance. It clearly mimics the structure of myths, which is pointedly signaled by Margot’s explanation of the meaning behind tarot cards, “Life, death, rebirth.” This is a journey of coming to terms with the self and battling our darkest urges and ruminations, but that doesn’t forgive the second half feeling flat as we’re led to Margaret having a revelation that doesn’t feel nearly powerful enough. While filled with technical splendor, The Blazing World has great ambition but fails to come up with original ways to explore its infinite universe.
