A deep dive into adolescent alienation, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair watches a lonely teen named Casey (Anna Cobb)—mostly via her laptop webcam—as she participates in an online horror game. The game supposedly instigates strange transformations in its players, something Casey documents (or invents?) in videos she makes and uploads on the Internet. (Consider this the nightmare version of Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade.)
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, making their first feature, shows a strong command of the film’s specialized aesthetic. The extended opening sequence consists of a fixed shot from the POV of Casey’s webcam as she records herself joining the game. (The process includes pricking your fingertip with a pin and smearing blood on the screen.) Later, Schoenbrun’s camera choices reflect the reality that online teens are necessarily filmmakers, as Casey adjusts the lighting in her bedroom (emphasizing Day-Glo decals that add a particularly psychedelic effect) and places her laptop on a swivel chair to achieve just the right angle for recording herself while she sleeps (there’s a dash of Paranormal Activity, which Casey also references, in one of the creepier scenes.) One clever touch involves a graphic of circling arrows on Casey’s screen, indicating that a new video is uploading. Eventually the graphic takes over our screen as well—this is one of those films that might benefit from watching on a laptop—especially during a montage of unsettling, World’s Fair-related videos made by others.
Offline, Casey doesn’t seem to have much in terms of community or emotional support, a fact emphasized by an early montage of drearily generic suburban commercial spaces, including a shot of an upturned shopping cart half-buried in a pile of dirty snow. From what we can tell she has no friends; her father is a threatening offscreen presence. Casey’s loneliness and disassociation becomes increasingly apparent in the videos she uploads, including a wry walk through a cemetery, which she describes as her “school,” and a visit to a dingy Christmas display, where she tells a black-eyed Santa figure to “stop smiling.” When the camera turns onto Cobb, she hides Casey behind an appropriately inscrutable expression. Casey, after all, can’t get a handle on who she wants to be—an experience she then performs, via her World’s Fair “transformation” videos, for her viewing audience.
Among that audience is a mysterious figure who goes by the username of JLB, with an eerily illustrated profile photo. We eventually see him—a middle-aged man (Michael J. Rogers) on a computer in what appears to be a teenager’s bedroom in a palatial suburban home—but his intentions are never entirely clear. Is he a predator? A protector? Just another alienated person seeking meaning on the Internet?
I’m still working out whether the ambiguity with which We’re All Going to the World’s Fair ends—regarding these questions and others—is to the movie’s credit or a frustrating facet. No matter where the film leaves us narratively, however, its evocation of estrangement—even, perhaps especially, as part of an Internet where we can talk to anyone at anytime—is both emotionally palpable and cinematically potent.
(4/29/2022)
