Content Warning: Mention of Self-Harm
Fairy tales have been synonymous with light, bright animation since Disney started churning out their adaptations despite the sinister tones of the source material. However, films like the children’s nightmare fuel Coraline, the cannibalistic fever dream of The Lure, and a solid chunk of Guillermo del Toro’s repertoire prove that fairy tales can be anything but wholesome.
The Blazing World, Carlson Young’s feature debut based on her short film of the same name, has all the elements to join the pantheon of brutal fantasy films – in theory. It’s certainly got the disorienting element down, but everything else doesn’t quite add up. Between its half-baked trauma exploration and its meandering plot, Young’s concept doesn’t match up to its execution.
The film has a promising start: twins (Elizabeth and Josie Fink) frolicking in an expansive field catching multicolored fireflies to Tchaikovsky’s “Pas de Deux” sets the surreal fantasy aspect of the film automatically. Tragedy quickly strikes when the twins’ parents Tom (Dermot Maloney) and Alice (Vinessa Shaw) get into a particularly violent fight and one of the unsupervised twins ends up drowning in the family’s pool. The “Pas des Deux” continues playing while in the midst of the chaos is the first appearance of Lained (Udo Kier) and his gaping portal: a recurring figure in the surviving twin’s life. The trippy visuals continue into Margaret’s (Carlson Young) adult life through her nightmares, her nostalgic visit to a club in her hometown, and when she inevitably goes down the “rabbit hole”. The dull, muted tones of Margaret’s life slowly become saturated with neon hues the further she slips out of reality and into her own head. Combined with the blended orchestral/synth score, it’s effective in establishing the dissolving barriers between her carefully constructed sense of self and the world of Lained.
Unfortunately, trippy visuals cannot compensate for a fundamentally weak plot. After its opening sequence, The Blazing World meanders from plot point to plot point. It makes sense when Margaret is meandering around the shell of her childhood home and trying to distract herself with the trappings of her hometown. However, once Lained finally catches up to Margaret after a fifteen year chase, he drags her down into a world where nothing ever makes sense. In Lained’s world, Margaret (and, unfortunately, the audience) is dragged along various visual nods and familiar plot recycling from Pan’s Labyrinth and Alice in Wonderland. She encounters various “monsters” to outwit to receive keys that allow her to escape the fantastical nightmare of her own design. Here the plot shifts between nonexistent, mostly when Margaret is running around Beetlejuice style hallways, and extremely hamfisted when she meets with the “monsters” that hold the literal and metaphorical keys to her release from the nightmare headspace she’s thrown herself into.
Perhaps the most sinister aspect of The Blazing World is its characterization, or rather lack thereof. Margaret and her parents each represent bland, one dimensional methods of processing trauma. Tom secludes himself and becomes more belligerent and reliant on alcohol while Alice sobs to remember her lost child and takes sleeping pills when she’s decided she had enough remembering. The worst by far is Margaret. Our re-introduction to her as an adult begins with her walking toward a bathtub, fully clothed with a razor blade sitting on the side; while this scene does not contain her self-harming, the imagery of the action does come back up in an extended sequence during the incomprehensible final half hour. Her days are spent in her modestly sized New York City apartment, smoking weed and watching a spiritualist on television to make sense of her visions of Lained. When Margaret enters Lanied’s realm, he forces her to confront exaggerations of the coping mechanisms she’s had to witness. Obviously, none of the coping mechanisms utilized by any of the surviving family members are constructive, it’s all the characters are reduced to. Making their methods of dealing with trauma seem inherently awful while giving them nothing resembling a positive characteristic feels like the film is forcing the concept of there being one “correct” way to process a traumatic event.
The experience of The Blazing World is more like a Pinterest board of inspirations than its own thing. The plot boils down to, as one Twitter user @heylucymay puts it, “Coraline for girls with trust funds” and the visuals, while impressive, are Suspiria blended with Jodorowsky. Additionally, for a film hinging on the resulting devastation of the death of a child, its exploration of trauma is so surface-level it borders on painful. The amount of nods to other films and directors acts as a nagging reminder to the viewer that there’s something better to be watching. However sickeningly sweet the exterior of The Blazing World might appear, its plot and flat characters make for a bitter pill to swallow.
