Curious is the current emphasis on women’s trauma in American genre film—the way it’s discussed online, marketed, singled out in the headlines—as if trauma were not already deeply embedded in the historical fabric of horror movies. Of course, in a time when more women filmmakers than ever are being given the opportunity to tell their stories, the rise of feminist horror should come as no surprise, especially given the #MeToo phenomenon and efforts to destigmatize mental illness. “The Blazing World,” is one of several films playing this year’s Sundance that might call itself “feminist horror.” But it’s also the weakest, and its failures are a reminder that genre trends—even those rooted in social progress—are prone to eating themselves hollow.
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First-time feature film director Carlson Young, an actress with over a decade’s worth of television credits (MTV’s “Scream,” Disney Channel’s “As the Bell Rings”), allegedly takes inspiration from the proto-science fiction story by Margaret Cavendish, also called “The Blazing World.” But that work of feminist utopian fiction has little to do with Young’s movie—which the actor/director first released as a short film in 2018—beyond a female protagonist who journeys into a separate, fantastical realm.
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“The Blazing World” is explicitly about a young woman’s trauma. In the bombastic opening scene, blonde twins in matching pink outfits mill around the lush green exterior of an impressive estate. Their movements are captured in slow motion to bolster the drama of it all, while the orchestral swell of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” inflates the sense of looming catastrophe. You see this trick play out in the opening of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” for instance, but here the tragedy rings false, overwhelmed by stimuli and scattershot style. While one of the girls, Margaret, observes her parents fighting—a scene that devolves into abuse—the other accidentally slips into the pool. After the family discovers the girl’s body, we see a leering old man (Udo Kier) beckoning Margaret into a black portal. He’s a presence that will come to represent the girl’s trauma and her impulses towards self-harm.
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We then jump forward in time and see Margaret (Young) attending college and donning the same blonde bob from youth. The repeated image of an arm floating in a pool of red water points to her suicidal state. When she gets a call from her mother (Vinessa Shaw) asking her to collect her things in preparation for the family’s upcoming move, Margaret must return to her childhood home and face her demons. Frazzled by her parents’ erratic behavior and the painful memories attached to the house, Margaret is lured into an alternate universe by the same ghastly figure from the opening. A grim reaper of sorts, he promises to reunite the young woman with her dead sister once she succeeds in collecting several keys hidden in different parts of this nightmare world. For his part, Kier is mesmerizingly creepy, but his natural eeriness promises something much more terrifying than the film ever manages to commit to screen.
A sort of modern Alice in Wonderland with her tulle gown and innocent demeanor, Margaret embarks on a series of quests, which she accesses by opening doors in a green-lit hallway. Each journey is a surreal, screwed-up version of a past real-life encounter, but with monstrous versions of her parents. She has “tea” with her mother, a masked Mad Hatter, in a cabin in the middle of a desert. Her father (Dermot Mulroney) appears in a netherworld version of his study with gashes on his face. Pulling from countless fantasy and horror classics—“The Shining,” “Coraline,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” to name a few—Young loses sight of her own vision, cobbling together a pastiche tapestry of her influences with the seams sloppily on display. At best, the film’s vivid production design, shifting playfully between jarring monochromatic set-pieces filled with bizarre knick-knacks from the recesses of Margaret’s brain, makes for some fun eye-candy.
But Young’s reliance on such nonsensical razzle-dazzle ultimately feels like a crutch, and as one becomes accustomed to the acid-horror madness of it all, the effect begins to feel cheap. As the film builds up to its climax, we realize Young’s understanding of mental illness lacks any real depth or complexity, betraying the artist’s limited worldview. “The Blazing World” is female trauma in the form of an amusement park funhouse. [D+]
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