We’re All Going to the World’s Fair review: horror for internet junkies

Once everyone has gone to bed, the internet changes. When the world around you goes to sleep, the web behind it expands and contracts. It becomes a portal that takes you somewhere else. It’s Alice’s Looking-Glass by way of YouTube links. At strange hours, people’s attention is more easily drawn to the internet’s stranger corners, where it’s possible to commune, however indirectly, with the others who are drawn to them too.

In Jane Schoenbrun’s mesmerizing We’re All Going to the World’s FairCasey, a lonely teenager (Anna Cobb), spends most of her time in that corner. After a long spell of watching videos of other people posting about the World’s Fair, an internet urban legend wrapped around a secret rite of passage, she decides to join in herself. She is seen sitting in her loft bedroom at night under the light of her laptop’s screen at the beginning of the film. She follows each step of the ritual: She pricks her finger, smears the blood on the screen, plays a video, and chants “I want to go to the World’s Fair” three times. Then her journey begins — a journey she naturally documents online, as part of the process of telling a collective story.

According to the legend, once someone participates in the World’s Fair Challenge, as it’s called, they’ll start to change in unpredictable and undefined ways. They will be able to see the truth of their worst fears and most terrifying nightmares. This is only the beginning of the ritual. Participants will continue to post videos and document any changes that occur. It is possible that something terrible will happen. One man may become an evil clown. A second man finds strange growths on his arm. Casey is curious to know what will happen.

A majority of World’s FairFollow Casey on her creepypasta-filled rabbit hole as she watches and makes videos. It’s a very solitary film — Casey doesn’t talk to another person in real life, nor does she ever share the frame with one. While most of the film unfolds from the perspective of webcams, it occasionally pulls back to show how empty the film’s real-world spaces are. Casey’s attic bedroom recedes into the background, a claustrophobic, endless maw. With abandoned large-box department shops and sparse, dead treelines, Suburban decay is evident in her environment. Once, we hear someone — presumably a parent — yell at Casey to turn her volume down. It’s the only time someone talks to her offline.

Internet-driven horrors of this nature We’re All Going to the World’s FairConnectivity is the foundation of exploring. Online people are all too aware of the lives and experiences of others. The youthful yearning of “Is this all there is?” suddenly has a concrete answer: no, it isn’t. But there is more. That discovery at first is exhilarating: There is so much!The internet has brought us so many ideas and people, some better than others. It can also be terrifying, if you stop to think that maybe it’s possible to see too much.

As Casey posts her videos and lets the algorithm pull her deeper into the World’s Fair community, someone named JLB (Michael L. Rogers) contacts her. JLB is a vlogger who doesn’t show his face — whenever he posts, he has a stand-in illustration of a ghoul with a rictus grin. He reaches out to people taking the World’s Fair challenge, with the understanding that his interests and conversation are strictly “in-game” — his modus operandi is to take the World’s Fair challenge very seriously, never breaking character, in the hopes that he and the people he talks to “get scared together.”

JLB appreciates Casey’s approach to the World’s Fair challenge, as her videos take on the vérité horror of creepypasta. They’re plain, unadorned recordings of normal behavior, quietly interrupted by something upsetting. Maybe there’s a supernatural element at play, or maybe all the participants are just acting, in order to feel like they’re part of a community, or possibly to live out their own fantasies of change. Cobb’s debut performance blurred the lines between reality and fiction so well that it was difficult to discern which direction she was going. World’s Fair She is heading to land. Is she really dissociating and having out-of-body experiences, or is she psyching herself out and using the World’s Fair to explain away feelings of depression or dysphoria? Are her sleepwalking or performing for the many people that watch her videos? Do you think she is being haunted or growing up?

Image by Utopia

When consciousness and sleep battle over the minds of everyone lost in an infinite scroll of information, it becomes difficult to discern the differences between real horror and role-play. Only one consistent anchor are the familiar round arrows on the internet, which automatically loads another video for Casey. Her aimless loading and scrolling blurs with her aimless wandering around her hometown, and the longer she plays the online game, the harder it gets to tell how calculated her behavior is, whether she knows which parts of the story are real and which aren’t, or whether she ever did.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a work of algorithm-horror, presenting a world — our world — where young people are trying to figure out who they are while machines also watch them, trying to figure them out even faster. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm doesn’t know the difference between sincerity and irony, between propaganda and boundary-pushing satire of varying tastes. It’s just interested in keeping people watching. There’s always another video ready to go. The algorithm is hard-coded to presume that no one will ever find what they’re looking for.

It is almost impossible to find out your identity online. It is hoped that everyone will find community online. Schoenbrun suggests people have the power to decide what and who they wish to be within this wide range of collective expression. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t just a movie about connecting, it’s about becoming. It’s a powerful acknowledgement of how confounding and frightening young adulthood can be. But it’s also a film about hope. There’s a name for the specific kind of alienation and confusion its characters are feeling. Maybe, it suggests, people like Casey will find that name, in spite of the machine’s best efforts.

We’re All Going to the World’s FairIs now in Theaters. AppleVudu, and many other digital services available on April 22.