Anyone who’s ever fallen down a seemingly endless Creepypasta wormhole will shiver during the the opening moments of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Alone in the attic bedroom where the film will spend much of its time, young Casey (Anna Cobb) hypnotically repeats the phrase, “I want to go to the world’s fair,” several times into her webcam before starting a strobing, seizure-inducing video. She’s taking the “World’s Fair Challenge,” which, according to online urban legend, brings unimaginable “changes” to the player, a fate that she promises to document via video updates to her YouTube channel.
It’s at precisely this point that the viewer begins to anxiously anticipate the horrors that will befall Casey. But Jane Schoenbrun’s debut fiction feature, being of a gentler nature than, say, a Slender Man movie, is primarily preoccupied with the existential dimensions of Casey’s crushing loneliness. Living in an anonymous wasteland of big box stores and empty parking lots, she has no friends and no parental supervision; her disgruntled father is always out working and makes a single off-screen appearance, yelling at Casey to shut up when she’s making too much noise at night. The computer is her only escape, a conduit to a world where anything is possible, and Schoenbrun largely frames her within candid video confessionals.
While it’s generally apparent that Casey is aware that she’s engaging in a harmless MMO role-playing game—in an early video diary, she states that she “loves horror movies and always wanted to live in one”—her youthful exuberance belies a deeper trauma, inviting us to wonder whether her mental state may in fact be deteriorating in sync with the game. In the film’s most striking sequence, Casey is performing an impressively choreographed dance to a sugary techno-pop track when she suddenly pitches a bloodcurdling screaming fit. A second later, she slides right back into the routine as if nothing happened. But in no small part due to Cobb’s utterly riveting performance, it’s much harder for us to shake off what just occurred to her.
In time, a secondary character is introduced into this claustrophobic milieu: JLB (Michael J Rogers), a mysterious avatar and self-proclaimed World’s Fair Challenge student who reaches out to Casey. Unsurprisingly, JLB is a much older man, and as the film slowly cuts into his world, we see that he lives a similarly solitary existence. Schoenbrun carefully walks a tightrope with her depiction of Casey and JLB’s burgeoning relationship. JLB’s backstory is ambiguous, but clues are offered that suggest he isn’t drawn to Casey for entirely insidious reasons. The arrangement of figurines around his office and the brief appearance of another woman silently carrying out some luggage suggest that he may have lost a child. But, then again, what about the notes filled with QAnon conspiracy jargon on his desktop screen?
Casey and JLB switch to Skype in order to share messages, endeavouring to solve the puzzle of the World’s Fair Challenge, but eventually JLB breaks the illusion of the game, fearing that Casey may harm herself or others, and their correspondence abruptly ends. Casey lashes out and severs contact with JLB, after which JLB continues to tend to the narrative of their role-playing in his head. In theory, it’s a fitting anticlimax, rubber-stamping the transactional, fleeting nature of online connections and the internet’s capacity to foster delusional wish-fulfilment. But the sharp pivot away from the character we’ve grown attached to feels like a miscalculation. In contrast to the haunting conclusion of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse, still the greatest evocation of isolation in the digital age, this film’s finale is almost too inscrutably internal. Meanwhile, the shoegaze-heavy soundtrack swells to indicate deeper emotional rivers, but it only pierces the delicate mood that has otherwise been so carefully maintained.
Nevertheless, this is a film that memorably gets under the skin—and literally so in one scene where Casey views a video of a man grotesquely pulling a string of tickets out from his forearm. Schoenbrun, whose 2018 documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination is a collage of YouTube clips that delve into the Slender Man phenomenon, memorably cooks tension from the randomness and anonymity of the videos and images that we regularly stumble upon. As Casey listens to playlists and watches an assortment of odd, contextless video clips, each one flowing into one another, you can’t help but get swept up in the sheer arbitrariness of this content overload. In this moment, for their depiction of how an ASMR video becomes a de facto parent to Casey and lulls the girl to sleep, Schoenbrun confirms that they are an artist adroitly plugged into both the current technological and sociological landscape.
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