Sundance Film Festival movie review: 'The Blazing World'
The highly stylized and surreal horror fantasy 'The Blazing World' (premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival) is an impressionistic, hypnotic nightmare brought to cinematic life.
In short: Decades after the accidental drowning of her twin sister, self-destructive Margaret (Carlson Young) returns to her family home, finding herself drawn to an alternate dimension where her sister may still be alive.
Beneath the saturated neon color palette and jarring imagery, 'Blazing World' finds a family living in the prolonged torment of a child's death. And it's not like Margaret's family was warm and loving before her sister's sudden death. Her haunting journey is born from decades worth of trauma and pain that has deteriorated the spirits and frayed the bonds of Margaret's family.
Aside from the general emotional torment that permeates the entire film, 'Blazing World' uses something akin to a fetch quest to give the otherwise amorphous film something for the audience to grasp onto. Margaret navigates a hellish mirror world, seeking several items that could potentially save Margaret's sister.
Udo Kier is the weirdo casting directors seek out when objectively strange films go into production. This cinematic patron saint of all things unsettling tips the film's hand, indicating that 'Blazing World' unabashedly leans toward the abstractly disquieting.
Like a dream - or in this case a nightmare - 'Blazing World' is elusive in form, emphasizing the feeling rooted in the dream's tone. The film has the texture of a dream half remembered. Unfortunately, the film relies on tired horror conventions that border on tropes - such as squirming maggots and gruesome self-harm - to make sure the audience knows the scary movie is supposed to be scary. This film isn't subtle.
'Blazing World' ultimately asks the audience to follow Margaret on a depressed reimaging of Alice in Wonderland - except one rooted in child death, inner demons, emotional turmoil and suicidal despair. Aside from the aforementioned fetch quest framework, 'Blazing' immerses the audience in Margaret's intense depression and hopelessness. And as the film becomes increasingly fantastical, 'Blazing' becomes increasingly indistinct, defined more by impression and less by detailed specifics.
After 'Blazing World' shifts to the alternate dimension, the film just becomes a raw nerve of emotions: unarticulated but loud pain. The alternate world needn't be burdened with a litany of specifics and rules - but everything about the alternate dimension is vague to the point of making it difficult to track what is happening. Margaret must collect several items - sometimes she can steal them, others must be bargained for. 'Blazing' will likely lose audiences with the ill-advised choice to be enigmatic fantasy with little in the way of rules that could have been guardrails to help viewers grab on to something, anything, as Margaret descends deeper and deeper into darkness.
Final verdict: 'Blazing World' feels very authentic to whatever vision Carlson Young had in mind for this hazy traumatic fever dream. The debate now becomes whether this shadowy dream needed the feature-length treatment - to which the answer is no.
Score: 2.5/5
'The Blazing World' screens at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. This horror fantasy is not yet rated and has a running time of 101 minutes.
Directed by Carlson Young / Screenplay by Carlson Young & Pierce Brown / Score by Isom Innis / Cinematography by Shane F. Kelly / Film Editing by James K. Crouch / Production Design by Rodney Becker / Starring Carlson Young, Udo Kier, Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw, John Karna & Soko.
