Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair It begins with the Internet as we know it today, a place where people work seemingly from birth to build a brand. Casey (Anna Cobb), a girl who looks like she is on the precipice, meaningless to all those save the ones on that spot, between tween and teen. “Hey guys!” she announces into her webcam in the universal greeting of the vlogger before the bright look in her face falls and one realizes that she is rehearsing her broadcast, and her bored look in-between takes is a reminder that even children learn from a young age to present a different face to the world than their real one.
When she starts full recording, Casey announces her intention to partake in a viral stunt called the “world’s fair challenge,” in which people play a simplistic open-source game that has rumored psychological side effects. A horror junkie, Casey is intrigued by the challenge, and we see her act out its prerequisite ritual of pricking her finger and smearing blood on her screen before we see the POV of the webcam as she watches the video, the contents unseen but the strobing lights it produces dancing over her face in a manner redolent of the stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lasting only a few seconds, the ominous description of the world’s fair feels anticlimactic, and even Casey can’t fully hide her boredom as she chipperly promises to keep checking in with any updates.
Soon, though, Casey begins to feel strange in the wake of watching the world’s fair video, she seeks answers in various corners of the web. What follows is a descent into that old, weird Internet, the one that existed after the widespread adoption of DSL and high-speed connections but before the aggregation of the web into a handful of websites that funneled all users into the same retail and social platforms. This is the Internet of the ‘00s, the one where every hyperlink was a roll of the dice as to whether it would lead somewhere wanted or merely to grotesque images of sex and gore. The one where entire websites were built around a single niche topic, and where graphic design was so primitive that it straddled the line between whimsically childlike and clinically insane.
This digital backdrop quickly sinks the film’s tone from idle curiosity to sinking dread, where it remains for its running time. It also provides both an allegorical and literal connection to Schoenbrun’s true aim with the film to tackle the subject of gender dysphoria and the budding awareness of one’s identity. Casey describes her increasingly disturbing reaction to the video with ”It’s like I can feel myself leaving my body, like it’s making me someone else,” and soon her self-alienation is filtered through the genre terms of possible possession. Without prior knowledge of the filmmaker’s intent, it would be easy for cisgender viewers to miss this theme, as the film never mentions it directly, instead opting to capture the messy, irresolute feelings of a young person becoming aware that they don’t fit the mold and are incapable of handling the emotional fallout of that realization.
Schoenbrun continues to develop these ideas through the prism of Internet culture, lending them a more universally relatable application to those young enough to know the intense pressure of growing up in a warped reality informed by Andy Warhol’s old notion of everyone’s 15 minutes of fame. By virtue of being a mostly unremarkable child in a nondescript rural town, Casey is streaming to effectively no one, yet even as she succumbs to a split mind and outbursts of uncontrollable behavior, it’s telling that the “normal” part of her still feels compelled to put on a show for her paltry followers. One of the film’s most unnerving scenes involves a Paranormal Activity-esque moment of nighttime sleep-waking in which an unconscious but awake Casey breaks into a clownish grin, but just as terrifying is another moment in which during the day she films herself dancing to some new TikTok craze. Suddenly, she stops dead and screams bloody murder, only to snap back into it and resume dancing with a carefree smile.
As Casey’s mental collapse unfolds online, the film walks a fine line in capturing the capacity of the Internet to further isolate misfits while also giving them avenues to make connections impossible in their immediate, tangible circle. This is most obvious in the connection that Casey makes with JLB (Michael Rogers), a middle-aged man who finds her videos and begins having Skype calls with her to warn her about other world’s fair challenge participants. Schoenbrun respects the inherent imbalance of unmonitored communication between a child and an adult man, and at times even Casey realizes how dangerous their vulnerable talks really are. Yet by the same token, the film is sensitive to the unlikely bonds that can form between complete strangers who share niche interests. As Casey confesses, she feels she cannot discuss what’s happening to her with her father “because he’ll think I’m fucking crazy,” but even as JLB’s interest remains unsettlingly ambiguous he at least provides a sympathetic ear.
Absent jump scares or fake-outs, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is nonetheless one of the best horror films in recent memory, leaning on a method of atmosphere more common to the literary realm than the cinematic. But it also succeeds by fully combining form and function, of never stating the subtext aloud while infusing every moment with ideas that tackle each of the film’s themes and interests in holistic, compellingly contradictory ways. At a time when horror cinema is more interested than ever in hammering its themes to flatter both audiences and their own less-respected genre trappings, to see a film communicate entirely through its aesthetic and tonal choices is a breath of fresh air.
Photo courtesy of Utopia
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