Review: As Horror, The World Is Full of Secrets Is More Theoretical than Visceral

Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.

The World Is Full of Secrets
Photo: Ravenser Odd

Writer-director Graham Swon’s The World Is Full of Secrets centers on two sorts of perversity, of narrative structure and of morality, with the former intended to elaborate on the latter. Set on a summer evening in 1996, the film concerns a group of teenage girls who get together and try to shock each other with the worst stories they’ve ever heard. This evening is recalled from the future by a grown version of one of the girls (voiced by Peggy Stefans), who says that something awful eventually happened to them that night. The film has nesting horror-movie conceits, then, and Swon undermines our expectations of each one, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.

The World Is Full of Secrets most obviously suggests a horror anthology, which Swon has staged with a hallucinatory flair. When Clara (Dennise Gregory) talks to her mother on her bed, Swon shows only the girl’s hand and knee, with the mother entirely out of the frame until her hand enters late in the scene. It’s a deliberately alienating composition that transforms a potentially routine moment of exposition into something more suffocating—a constriction that’s intensified by the film’s boxy aspect ratio. Clara and her friends speak in a flat, affected tone that’s partially reflective of young people’s ideas of coolness, while more pertinently embodying Swon’s desire to ensure that nothing in his film go down conventionally or easily. He’s as eager to make an impression as his young characters.

There are other eerie directorial emphases throughout the film that suggest the random details we seize upon retrospectively when trying to make sense of moments of extremis. Before her friends arrive at her house, Clara watches an old black-and-white crime movie on TV in her bedroom, and Swon accords this movie a weird prominence, with a series of dissolves that gradually bring Clara’s television set closer to us. Swon holds on the crime movie for so long that one is encouraged to scrutinize it for clues as to whatever is going to happen to Clara and her friends. Other dissolves and abstract close-ups prime the audience for the atrocity to which the voiceover, with a kind of cornball dreadful-ness, continually alludes.

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At a certain point in The World Is Full of Secrets, one is ready for Swon to get down to the business of telling at least one of the stories he’s set up. The tedium of this film’s continual hinting around is partially a joke, as even one of the girls admits to boredom with one of her friend’s endless foreshadowing, and partially an attempt to make atmosphere, rather than incident, the subject of contemplation. Two close-ups of two of the girls, Emily (Alexa Shae Niziak) and Suzie (Ayla Guttman), each last over 20 minutes, as Swon allows them to tell their horrible tales in their entirety. Emily speaks of a Christian girl in Rome who’s beaten, raped, and executed for refusing to marry a powerful man, while Suzie tells of a modern teenage girl who’s beaten and burned alive by her peers for dating the wrong person. The stories rhyme of course, suggesting essentially the same root atrocity, only with differing social flavor.

The stories are meticulously written and deliberately drawn out, with multiple potential ending points. This is another instance of Swon testing our patience, though the stories do also come to life, and the relish with which Emily and Suzie relate their stories is disturbing and truthful to the glee of children seeking to outrage one another. There’s something indecent in Emily and especially Suzie’s pleasure in these stories, and Swon suggests that this callousness summoned whatever tragedy befalls the girls later in the night. That tragedy, in another of Swon’s audience-thwarting conceits, is never revealed. Our rueful narrator seems intent on taking it to her grave, after spending 98 minutes elaborating on context and minutiae. The World Is Full of Secrets is concerned with the foundation of horror, rather than its aftermath, and that notion makes for a film that’s more theoretical than visceral.

Score: 
 Cast: Elena Burger, Dennise Gregory, Ayla Guttman, Alexa Shae Niziak, Violet Piper, Peggy Steffans  Director: Graham Swon  Screenwriter: Graham Swon  Running Time: 98 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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