The first film to mine the feeling of reading a creepypasta, instead of just using the texts for I.P., Jane Schoenbrun’s narrative debut “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” is a lo-fi horror show more interested in the every day scares of teenage boredom and internet culture than anything supernatural. This isn’t to say that nothing malevolent happens in ‘World’s Fair,’ named after the “internet’s scariest online horror game.” More so, Schoenbrun seems acutely aware of the paradoxical pull of the internet, and the ways that it both connects and isolates individuals looking for an escape from the doldrums of adolescence and suburbia. While a bit too opaque near the end, and perhaps not the horror show that one might expect, it’s nevertheless an impressive debut.
Toggling between filmed confessionals, newsfeed-like scrolls of videos, and more traditional film set-ups, ‘World’s Fair’ follows the teenaged Casey (newcomer Anna Cobb) as she live-blogs her life. Bored with her more mundane existence, she commits to playing the titular game and updating viewers on what happens. Three chants, a pinprick, and a strobing video later, she’s part of an internet trend that seemingly transforms participants. Though like everything on the internet these days, there’s little consensus on what that something is — one mentions how they are “turning into plastic,” another that they feel like “Tetris” is being played in their body.
What begins to happen to Casey is appropriately creepy, as she begins to film her sleep scheduling and turns to ASMR videos to help with the increasing feeling of dread, but Schoenbrun is more interested in connections that these types of viral games form, for better and, ultimately, for worse. Her updates attract the attention of JLB (Michael J. Rodgers), an older man that sends her cryptic messages about the trouble she’s gotten herself into — including one of her face essentially melting — to get her attention. As they begin talking, JLB requests updates from Casey because, of course, he cares about her.
His attempts to ingratiate himself in Casey’s world are initially welcomed by a teenager looking for any type of human connection — her home life is almost exclusively limited to her bedroom with her stuffed animal, as her father occasionally yells at her to be quiet. Whenever she does venture out, it’s either to the local cemetery (where she films a ‘tour’ of her high school) or more often to film the crumbling town that surrounds her house.
But as things get stranger for Casey, Schoenbrun makes a particularly audacious decision to move away from Casey’s POV and, instead, follow JBL as he obsessively combs through her videos for anything he can talk to her about. From here, ‘World’s Fair’ abandons Casey’s contained narrative and begins to mimic a scrolling news feed, toggling between Casey, JBL, and various online videos that contextualize and elaborate on the role-playing game. It’s a disorienting, but quite remarkable, narrative decision that captures the obsessive qualities that these types of online trends often elicit.
JBL’s obvious attempts to groom Casey, and her own yearning for connection, becomes the central tension in the latter half of the film, but ‘World’s Fair’ resists neat genre distinctions at almost every turn. By transitioning from horror to thriller to character study, the film effectively and disturbingly flips the script on something that could’ve been much more standardized. What happens to Casey flirts between the real and imaginary, and is never really given proper closure. Instead, we are given a disturbing portrait of how the internet’s affordances of anonymity often reveal the truth about people; a much scarier prospect than anything happening to those who partake in the game. [A-]