By Vera Tomasi
We’re All Going To The World’s Fair
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
2021, United States
Starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers, May Leitz
We spend so much of our lives bathed in the light of blue screens. Our faces remain blank as we scroll through our phones, as if we have left our bodies. Where are we, then? We’re inside the internet.
Jeremiads about the evils of online life are everywhere, but most of this hand-wringing ignores a vital question: why are we drawn to the internet in the first place? In Jane Schoenbrun’s brilliant debut film, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, the internet is a space where alternatives to the realities of daily life seem briefly possible. It is a space that blends intimacy with distance, promise with peril. For better or worse, the internet is the only place where the film’s characters feel momentarily free.
World’s Fair centers on Casey, an isolated teen who joins an online horror game called The World’s Fair Challenge. From her dimly lit bedroom, Casey records an initiation ritual that will, according to online lore, transform her into “something terrible.” World’s Fair has been billed as a horror movie, but that label does the film a disservice. Really, it is a film about characters who use horror to make sense of their lives, and the film’s meditative pace is more reminiscent of Chantal Akerman or Tsai Ming-Liang than Wes Craven.
For much of the film, we watch Casey watching and recording videos. Although we see little of Casey’s life beyond her time online, it is clear that her daily routine is lonely and uneventful. In one lengthy shot, she trudges through the snow, running a stick along a chainlink fence. In another, she glances up with fear at the sound of her father’s approach and retreats to her bedroom. The videos that Casey watches belong to the World’s Fair universe. The game consists of performing a spooky ritual then uploading videos to share one’s “symptoms.” Much of the film’s suspense hinges on the question of whether the curse is real, or whether the players in the videos are merely acting, performing their own descents into monstrosity and madness. In one video, a player appears to tear open his forearm, revealing a string of arcade tickets buried beneath his skin. In another, titled “I Can’t Feel My Body!” a player repeatedly slaps himself without seeming aware that he is doing so.
Crucially, Casey and the other players do not fear but rather long for these horrific transformations. “It’s getting worse,” one player says, “but it feels good.” Another player claims that the curse “can access your dreams” in order to change you. Schoenbrun has mentioned that the film is, obliquely, about gender dysphoria, that painful dissonance between one’s actual body and one’s sense of self. Casey’s simultaneous yearning for and terror of transformation is obviously legible as a metaphor for dysphoria, but the film can’t be reduced to mere allegory. World’s Fair shows the way in which the internet’s promise of disembodiment draws all of us in. As we watch Casey watching the videos that entice and terrify her, we are reminded of our own gaze, our own desire for the escape or transcendence that films, like the internet, can provide.
“I know I don’t really know you,” a player tells Casey over Skype, “but I feel like I do.” World’s Fair is not only about the allure of disembodiment, or the dream of a realm beyond daily life that both cinema and the internet allow. It is also about the way in which the internet paradoxically enables intimacy while preserving immense distance. By the second half of the film, it becomes clear that the World’s Fair curse is indeed fictional, and that the game is a collaborative storytelling enterprise. Characters record fictional videos, talk to each other in character, and send each other cryptic messages. This imaginative play enables an emotional openess that Casey would clearly struggle with in “real” life. When she begins exchanging messages with another player, a middle-aged man named JLB, she is able to admit (in character) to feelings of alientaton and fear that she could otherwise not express. The film, however, is no mere simplistic celebration of fiction’s power to console. It also conveys the dangers inherent in both art-making and online relationships. For one thing, JLB is a morally ambiguous figure. He approaches Casey in character, claiming that he wants to “save her” from the curse, but what are his real motives?
Even if World’s Fair doesn’t fit neatly into the horror genre, Schoenbrun does play with the expectations that we bring to horror films. We know that the film contains a source of danger, but our sense of what that source is keeps shifting. Is it the curse? Is it JLB? Or is it some darkness within Casey herself? In a brilliant move, Schoenbrun shifts the point of view halfway through the film, so that we follow JLB instead of Casey. Like Casey, JLB spends his days alone, staring into space as he sits in his house or watching videos online. Once we start watching Casey’s videos from JLB’s perspective, our sense of who Casey is, and what she’s capable of, begins to change. Her videos become increasingly disturbing, and it starts to seem that she is confusing fiction with reality. Instead of seeing the World’s Fair as a way to express truths about reality, she comes to see the game as reality itself.
In a recent interview, Schoenbrun points out that, “in cinema we can never really know what’s going on inside a character’s head, and thus, we can never truly know what motivates them. [This] also happens to be one of the core limitations of life as we know it in the physical world.” World’s Fair makes this central tragedy of our lives—our ultimate existential solitude—felt with an intensity unmatched in recent cinema. As we watch Casey’s videos from JLB’s point of view, we come to see that the seemingly naive and vulnerable teen is also bitter and angry, possibly even capable of murder. For all the time that we spend watching Casey, for all the emotional expressiveness of her face, we never really understand her. Anna Cobb is phenomenal in her portrayal of Casey’s many-sided personality. In a single laugh, she conveys scorn and pain, confusion and rage. In a single shot, as Casey’s smile fades into a dead-eyed look of self-disgust, Cobb expresses both hope and despair.
For so much of the film, the characters’ faces remain nearly blank. We study their expressions in an attempt to understand them. Does JLB’s slight smile imply satisfaction or anxiety? Is that a look of yearning on Casey’s face? The genius of World’s Fair is that, while it reminds us of our ultimate inability to know each other, it also awakens our futile desire to know and be known. The film’s manipulation of suspense, its brilliant acting, and its layered ambiguity make us care intensely about its characters. We yearn to know them, we yearn for them to remain safe, even as we come to see that we can no more understand them than we can, from our side of the screen, do anything to lessen their pain.
World’s Fair is a film about the power and dangers of the internet, the rewards and risks of making art, and the yearning and pain bound up in any search for human connection. For philosophical depth, emotional resonance, and structural beauty, it remains unsurpassed in recent film memory.
About the reviewer: Vera Tomasi is a writer who graduated from Brown University in 2019 with a degree in Literary Arts. They are currently enrolled in Bennington College’s fiction MFA program.