Courtesy Dweck Productions
You know at least one person who’s going to watch We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and then describe it as a brilliant commentary on people who live online. “It’s a little rough around the edges,” they’ll say, “but brilliant nonetheless.” Then there’s everyone else who’ll be left perplexed by director Jane Schoenbrun’s first full-length narrative film. Slow and methodical horror is an incredibly difficult genre to pull off successfully, but it’s still clear we’ve got a divisive film on our hands.
Casey (Anna Cobb, in an excellent debut performance) would like nothing more than to live inside a horror movie. In the film’s 10-minute single-shot opening, she stares into her webcam and declares, “I want to go to the World’s Fair,” over and over again. The fictional online roleplaying world where people live in a horror-movie like environment has a tendency to turn users into something strange—people who have an inability to feel pain, who develop strange scabs or even get pulled inside their computers. Do you know about the online Creepypasta stuff? That would be a good primer to help viewers understand. It’s meant to be fun, but as Casey is initiated into the game, an older man named JLB (Michael J. Rogers) takes a special interest in her well-being, and her dark thoughts begin revealing themselves.
World’s Fair’s atmosphere is tense and creepy, its silence completely mesmerizing. It’s so uncomfortably isolating you can’t help but feel sad for Casey’s life at its outset as it’s like an isolation that reflects a quiet inner terror inspired by the conditions of the world around her. Cobb’s superb performance adds to the film’s intriguing set-up, yet its commentary isn’t as clear as it ought to be. After so long in this relatively short film, one wishes we could just get on with it.
Despite a tense start, we aren’t granted any kind of satisfying payoff. Listen, we know young people are more reliant on the internet in a way that seems to baffle older generations, and they use it to build connections lacking from their personal lives. Actually, that might be a more universal thing. Even so, a more steadily building energy, even a slight one, would have worked wonders. Schoenbrun certainly knows how to kick off a story, but there are near-constant “this is my first feature,” vibes. The more studied horror geeks might find World’s Fair riveting, and if you’re one of them it’s worth a shot. As a whole, however, it flounders, even if there’s no denying how absolutely creepy the whole thing gets.
5
+Freaky set-up
-Becomes monotonous
We’re All Going To The World’s Fair
Directed by Schoenbrun
With Cobb and Rogers
CCA Cinema, NR, 86 min
