Sundance Film Festival 2021: "The Blazing World" an ambitious, visually striking, albeit hollow, fever dream

The Blazing World (2021)

Carlson Young blazes a new path with co-writing, directing, and starring in her feature directorial debut, “The Blazing World,” a nightmarish fairy tale down the neon-drenched rabbit hole of grief. It gets a bit high on David Lynch’s own singular supply and seems unpredictably strange for the sake of being strange, but Young (who co-wrote the script with Pierce Brown) admirably never compromises the artistically bold vision of her passion project by going small or holding a viewer's hand. An expansion of Young’s own 2018 short of the same name, “The Blazing World” is a full-bore fever dream that’s entirely all metaphysical mood and quixotic imagination. Maybe the style is the substance here, but one still wishes it gave more to chew on and feel. 

“Inspired by [scientist, playwright and first science fiction-publishing female author] Margaret Cavendish and other dreams”—and most likely influenced by “Alice in Wonderland,” “Labyrinth,” and the cinematic works of Tarsem Singh coupled with Dario Argento's saturated color scheme—"The Blazing World" is marked by strikingly off-center imagery, sound design, and production design. Opening with the orchestrations of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker," the film sets the tone of an idyllic storybook gone askew. A pair of young twin sisters, Lizzie and Margaret, play on a meadow and chase fireflies outside their sprawling family mansion. Inside, their parents (Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw) are too busy hating each other. As a creepy man named Lained (Udo Kier) tries luring them to a swirling portal, Lizzie ends up falling into the swimming pool and drowning. 

Carlson Young (who was so appealing on the MTV-ized series of “Scream”) is emotionally fearless and seems to be tapping into a place that strikes a raw nerve. She plays college-aged twin Margaret, who’s detached from the world and still reeling from the loss of Lizzie. When Mom calls her to tell her that the house is being sold, Margaret rushes home and finds her parents lonely, overmedicated, and drinking, so not much has changed. As memories of her childhood trauma bleed into her dreams and everywhere she goes, Margaret falls under the sway of her guide Lained. This time, it’s to find Lizzie, who may be caught in another dimension, from a vine-covered, red-and-green-hued version of her home to the dehydrated desert. 

There’s a lot of foreboding going on in “The Blazing World." From the jarring flash cuts of Udo Kier drowning Margaret in her Victorian bathtub to vibes of "The Shining" in the cool, immersive score by Isom Innis (Young’s husband), one is always kept on their toes even before entering the dreamscape. Carlson Young is lucky enough to have assembled a game cast of seasoned actors to crank up the weirdness factor, including Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw, and a reliably creepy, firefly-munching Udo Kier, who all turn in perfectly overwrought work. There's just something too heightened and overwhelmingly surreal about everything, including "the real world," in this story of unresolved trauma and depression that it's hard to connect on a grounded and deeper level. Hence, the emotional core of Margaret finding solace with herself rings a bit hollow in the end. The main takeaway from “The Blazing World,” though, is this being an exciting calling card for Carlson Young. Not only putting her everything on the screen as a performer, Young holds a lot of promise as a stylish and ambitiously abstract filmmaker telling the kinds of stories she wants to make. Watching her first time at bat, however, feels like being lost in someone else’s dream journal and never waking up.

Grade: C +

“The Blazing World” (99 min.) premiered in the Next section at the virtual Sundance Film Festival. It will be released by Vertical in select theaters and on VOD on October 15, 2021.