'The Blazing World' Review: Carlson Young's Exhaustively Art-Directed but Enervating Adult Fantasy
'The Blazing World' Review: Carlson Young's Exhaustively Art-Directed but Enervating Adult Fantasy
Writer-director-star Carlson Young pours much effort and feeling into this loose riff on a 17th-century sci-fi text, but who is it for?
Guy Lodge, provided by
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Running time: Running time: 99 MIN.
Courtesy of Greenbelt Films
For a filmmaker to take a possessive credit in their debut is already a confident move; for the opening credits of the first feature by writer-director-star Carlson Young to present it as “Carlson Young’s ‘The Blazing World’” is a brazen one. That title, of course, belongs first to a somewhat more established female author: Margaret Cavendish, whose 1666 book “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World” was a foundational work of science fiction. Cavendish’s adventurous exploration of alternate dimensions has given loose inspiration to Young’s glittery but grief-fueled fantasy, which those credits again describe as “inspired by Margaret Cavendish and other dreams.”