Mark Reviews Movies: THE BLAZING WORLD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 14, 2021

Co-writer/director Carlson Young's The Blazing World is directly about grief and trauma in an allegorical and, hence, somewhat indirect way. The filmmaker and star's debut feature, expanded from a previous short movie, is visually diverse and striking, as a young woman explores a world of fantasy or dream or some spiritual plane of existence. It's an admirably imaginative piece, although the narrative's shallowness, repetitiveness, and predictable trickery ultimately get the better of its visual elements.

Young stars as Margaret, whose twin sister drowned in the family swimming pool when the girls were children and while their parents—Tom (Dermot Mulroney) and Alice (Vinessa Shaw)—were distracted in a heated argument that turned violent. Margaret is convinced her sister was actually taken away through a mysterious portal by a troubling man named Lained (Udo Kier).

Upon returning to her family home to help her parents move, she sees the pair again. Margaret follows them into the portal and into a familiar but altered world.

The plot of Young and Pierce Brown's screenplay is more or less a scavenger hunt, as Lained informs Margaret that, if she retrieves four keys from four demons, she can open a door and bring her sister back to the real world. The demons, obviously, are symbolic figures—of her supernatural beliefs (Lained, who gives up his key willingly), her parents, and her own internal demons.

Alice is one, living alone in a cabin in a vast desert, wearing a mask, collecting trinkets from the past, and, as in the real world, telling Margaret how much she misses her. Tom is another, stuck in his home office and speaking of how he tries to hide the pain of a fire burning inside him. The ideas about how people deal with grief are simple and truthful, but the movie's entire fantasy/dream element adds too much emotional distance and a layer of artificiality.

The various spaces here (especially for the third task, in which Margaret is trapped in an illuminated box and has to confront her reflection) are inventive and haunting. Once it becomes clear that these otherworldly reflections of the real-world characters offer little more depth than we already know, though, this other world starts to feel like a gimmick or a game. The final revelations of The Blazing World transform even more of what we've seen into fantasy, confirming that suspicion.

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