The first twenty to thirty minutes of the Blazing World shows a lot of promise. But as the surreal weirdness drones on and on and on, it just gets less and less interesting. Maybe that was my inability to click with the symbolism or whatever, but it just kind of drones.

The flick is about a young woman who returns home to where her sister died when they were children. She’s convinced there’s another reality where her sister yet lives… probably as evidenced by Udo Kier beckoning her towards a portal the day of the death. Soon she’s brought to the other world where she gets a video game assignment to find three keys to open a door to release her sister.

Sure, some of the symbolic, weird imagery is inventive but I slowly realized I was getting nothing from each surreal encounter. For the first two thirds of the journey, it just seemed to result in an endless dialog with someone over obscure, cryptic concepts. The last act was more even more symbolic. Maybe a more thorough re-watch would make it less muddy, but I’m not really into that after finally rolling credits.

The film shares a lot with better films and I kept thinking of them. Coraline, Alice in Wonderland, Come True, pick any David Lynch film. Even at his worse, David Lynch films always feel like they make sense to him and/or have a greater surreal logic and flow. I’m not convinced that’s true here.

Admirable try and I’d look forward to what the writer/director (and star) does next. But this time it just didn’t work for me.

Score: 69