Critic Reviews

The visual effects are haunting, the costume design by Juliana Hoffpauir is delightfully fanciful, particularly for Shaw’s scenes as a nameless masked demon. The cinematography from veteran cinematographer Shane F. Kelly is a sight to behold. Basically, The Blazing World is gorgeous. It’s also incredibly well written by Peirce Brown and Young.

It’s an imperfect debut, but it holds thrilling promise for what comes next.

Overstuffed and overextended, The Blazing World is buoyed by the soundtrack (especially the songs by Isom Innis and Sean Cimino in their project Peel), and the too brief appearance by the wonderful Soko. In the end, the film tries too hard.

It’s obvious that Young wanted to make something unique. Hopefully she strikes a chord in the future, but The Blazing World is just patchwork.

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.

There’s plenty of imagination on display in The Blazing World, but it’s buried amidst the narrative and stylistic self-indulgence that assumes we’ll be interested in going on this very strange and ultimately enervating journey.

Young does her best to carry this all on her shoulders, and while she nails her early scenes playing up Margaret's instability, she eventually gets lost among all the scenery and abundant production design. Never quite as surreal as it needs to be, The Blazing World is an exercise in dream logic that stumbles over itself again and again.

Ambitious but tediously precious, sincerely conceived but derivatively realized, The Blazing World throws an ornate heap of production design at an anemically scripted psychological metaphor, and counts on a combination of fairy dust and sheer determined nerve to make the whole contraption fly.

The Blazing World falls short narratively and visually, not leaning hard enough into its stylistic possibilities to leave an impression past its opening credits. It’s fantasy for the sake of therapy, and there’s no romance or joy here in imagining a better realm.