The Blazing World (2021 | USA | 99 minutes | Carlson Young)

Any truly personal and genuinely ambitious film that manages to get made in this safe-bet, profit-driven cinema landscape deserves a round of applause. And The Blazing World, actor Carlson Young’s feature film directorial debut, possesses both ambition and a decidedly personal touch in spades.

The director plays Margaret, a college student nursing a past scarred by volatile parents and the childhood drowning death of her twin sister. When Mom and Dad (Vinessa Shaw and Dermot Mulroney) sell the family home and prepare to move, Margaret returns home, ostensibly to gather some of her belongings but also to make peace with her personal ghosts. 

Stubborn, surreal visions and memories, frequently populated by a mysterious figure named Lained (Udo Kier), have wracked Margaret since childhood, and those visions take her on a quest through what could be her imagination, an alternate dimension, or some strange combination of the two.

Young alludes to a tumultuous and violent childhood herself in The Blazing World’s press notes, which goes a long way towards explaining her knack for depicting the emotional dysfunction and rawness on display. The disconnect between Margaret and her mother (Vinessa Shaw), and the spiritual connection between her and her alcoholic father (Dermot Mulroney), register with palpable authority. 

The Blazing World uses those emotional fireworks as a springboard to a discomforting and visually striking alternate universe. Young’s clearly working out some heavy issues with a fantasy canvas, attempting to juggle the same balance of emotional richness and eerie dark fairy tale beauty that’s become Guillermo del Toro’s stock and trade. Young, her cinematographer Shane F. Kelly, and production designer Rodney Becker create their own often-impressive fantasy landscape of vast deserts, cosmic vortexes, bursts of color, and expressionistic shadows. It draws from multiple wells—The Wizard of Oz and the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Dario Argento among them—and it’s delivered with surprising efficacy, especially considering the low budget (dodge the plague-infected masses and try to safely catch this in a theater if you can).

Some grand and heady territory gets covered here, and like a lot of debut features, The Blazing World‘s reach doesn’t always meet its grasp. Great as Mulroney and Shaw are, the screenplay by Young and Pierce Brown doesn’t give either of Margaret’s parents much nuance. Kier’s piercing eyes and intense delivery work famously with his enigmatic character, but it’s hard to determine if some of his monologues are intentionally humorous, or ridiculous psycho-babble on par with Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda. And the writing and editing occasionally sketch things so oddly that basic plot points get lost or muddied in translation. 

That said, I’ll take a flawed swing for the fences over a lazy, big budget, by-the-numbers studio fantasy any day of the year. As a film, The Blazing World may not be perfect, but it’s one hell of a directorial calling card for Carlson Young. And when her storytelling hand catches up with her visual and emotional sensibility, she’ll be a creative force to reckon with—in whatever dimension she’s working. 

The Blazing World arrives in theaters and on VOD on October 15th; header image courtesy Vertical Productions.