The Blazing World

In his ambitious, surreal treatise on grief and pain, Carlson Young straddles the line between symbolism and literalism, the result of which is reminiscent of a walk through Pan’s Labyrinth accompanied by Tarsem Singh. The Blazing World is most impressive in its first half, in which it leaves viewers speechless with its unsettling, impressively filmed dream sequences (though the point of it all is rather obvious). What is even more regrettable is the mechanical nature of the narrative with its video-game structure in the second half, where everything is anchored in rationality, but also explained and thus to a significant extent rendered banal. An identical theme of loss and the difficulty of coping with it, also turned into narrative imbued with symbols and genre elements, was recently expressed more imaginatively and (at least for me) more enchantingly by the similarly polarizing indie gem Starfish. (08/01/2022)