When I arrived at Fort Worth Magazine in 2018, Carlson Young was the subject of a story in the first issue I had a hand in editing. At the time, I knew her as playing one of the main characters in the short-lived MTV show, “Scream,” and as the significant other of Isom Innis, keyboardist for the indie pop band Foster the People.
The 2018 article touches on her short film, “The Blazing World,” which debuted at Sundance Film Festival earlier that year, and her efforts to make said short film into a feature-length movie. “It's moving forward, slowly but surely,” Young said at the time. “We have producers and we finished rewrites.”
Three years later, Young has debuted the long-playing version of “The Blazing World” via this year’s Sundance Film Festival screenings at the Texas Theatre.
The film, which is co-written by Young and Pierce Brown, is based on a recurring dream Young had while shooting “Scream” and simultaneously writing a paper for one of her USC classes on Margaret Cavendish — considered the world’s first sci-fi fantasy writer and for whom the main character (played by Young) is named.
“She wrote a novel called ‘The Blazing World’ in 1666,” Young told us in 2018. “I kept having this dream where I was at a lunch table surrounded by all my childhood friends, and I was staring off into the distance where there was a hidden black hole.”
The fever dream of a film seems set in no particular time and no particular place — exclusively using cars and analog technology from the early aughts while simultaneously portraying smartphones; Young makes the viewer question reality from the get-go.
Within the first five minutes, the film’s main protagonist, a pre-teen Margaret, witnesses her father (played by a gracefully aged Dermot Mulroney) physically abusing her mother while her twin sister drowns in the family’s pool — a lot for a little girl to process. While all of this unfolds, Margaret’s creepily coaxed into entering a black hole by a man named Lained (played by Udo Kier, who’s no stranger to independent film). She doesn’t initially fall for Lained’s tricks, but this image of Lained and the black hole recurs throughout the film. From there, we’re brought to the present day, when a now-20-something Margaret gets a call from her mother announcing their plans to move. She’s asked to return to the family home to pack any belongings she might want to keep.
Upon her arrival, we witness the dilapidated state of the home and its inhabitants. The cold interactions between Margaret and her parents, all of whom struggle with mental illness, portray a frightening amount of emotional detachment and self-isolation.
That night, Margaret meets up with old friends at an empty and surreal bar/music venue called The Woods, where she engages in metaphysical conversations and takes acid. She eventually jumps into the black hole guarded by Lained, and an “Alice in Wonderland”-type hallucinatory nightmare takes the film hostage.
Ultimately, Margaret must battle three demons to rescue her twin sister from the purgatory where her sister is trapped. The demons, metaphorically, take the forms of her manic and depressed mother, alcoholic and abusive father, and her suicidal self.
The film touches on themes as varied as alcoholism, mental illness, suicide, self-mutilation, isolation, multi-dimensional travel, male chauvinism, the afterlife, upper-class boredom, addiction, and domestic abuse — a heavy load for an independent film. But Young manages to make great use of symbolism and metaphors to take on such weighty subjects. Any moment I feared Young was opening a Pandora’s box, she managed to tackle the subject matter with a surprising amount of grace and virtuosity for a first-time director.
All of these very real, very human concepts are wrapped in a fantastical façade of traveling through different dimensions. But, like any good science fiction story, the metaphysical subplot serves as a mere vehicle to get its bigger points across.
Despite the small budget, this is a big, ambitious film with big, ambitious ideas. While some might be turned off by her David Lynch-like imagery (Young does not fear disturbing her audience), or the loud, orchestra-meets-synthesizer soundtrack, the film is required viewing for anyone interested in seeing a local director on the rise.
The film was screened at Sundance Film Festival and has yet to receive wide distribution. Be on the lookout, as it will likely hit the streaming services in the next few months.
