The Blazing World
**Seen at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
When you connect with a movie on an aesthetic level, it’s always interesting to see what happens as the film digs deeper into the narrative. Will that extend beyond the surface, and into the larger picture of the movie, or will it just be surface deep? With Carlson Young’s “The Blazing World,” it doesn’t extend too much deeper than the surface of the film, but the surface is so remarkable that I could not help but get into the film entirely.
Based upon a short film Young made, her feature begins with Margaret and Elizabeth Winter as children, playing outside with fireflies. Their parents (Vinessa Shaw and Dermot Mulroney) are inside fighting, and that seems to be a frequent thing. As Margaret looks in on them fighting, Elizabeth goes into the pool and ends up drowning. About 15-20 years later, Margaret (played by Young) is in college, and about to go home to help her parents pack up. Ever since childhood, however, she’s had a lingering nightmare that Elizabeth didn’t actually die, but was taken into a portal to another dimension. When she gets home, those feelings are revived, and she might find herself having to explore that possibility herself.
From a narrative standpoint, Young and co-writer Pierce Brown are cribbing from “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Alice in Wonderland” as Margaret is led down the rabbit hole by the peerless Udo Kier as Lained, who seems malevolent at first but may, in fact, be helpful. As a lead for this story, Young is serviceable but I wonder if someone else might have been able to get deeper into the character, and into a story that I feel like does mean a lot to Young. As a director, Young makes a lot of over-the-top choices in staging, but I love the visual world building in this film, and the use of music. She has a strong eye for visual imagination, and an understanding of how she wants to use music, both things I’m bound to respond to from a film. Because of that, and Kier’s performance, “The Blazing World” has me curious to see where she goes from here.
