Who am I? It’s a fundamental question where the answer is a life’s pursuit. The life’s pursuit, really. Establishing our identities (always plural, ever fluid) is a much more complex endeavor in our current century, largely due to all those names listed on a philosophy class syllabus. But also the internet. Formerly a luxury, now a requirement, the internet’s tendency can often resemble a perpetual stream of desperate egotism, but it also provides a platform that affords opportunities to try on various identities, as opposed to, say, a millennium ago, when if your surname was Miller, your life’s pursuit was grinding wheat, Socrates be damned.
In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, this online conduit for restless expression and experimentation is shown through the framework of an online horror role-playing game. The film begins with Casey (Cobb) going through the World’s Fair initiation ritual: the incantation spoken thrice, the drawing of blood, the smearing of blood on monitor, and the watching of the revelatory video. Players of the World’s Fair subsequently begin to mutate, and post videos documenting their descent into madness, supernatural possession, and other staples of creepypasta mythology. A standard setup for a horror film, but filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (who, among other projects, was ringleader/executive producer for the equally slippery SXSW 2016 feature collective:unconscious) has not made a horror film, but a fractured portrait of teenage malaise, of deceptions (both of self and others), and of the awkward probing of a cocoon’s inner shell. Casey draws the attention of JLB (Rogers), who seems to be the game master of World’s Fair, and the two begin corresponding on the forum. Their friendship turns strange and borderline nefarious, although Schoenbrun leaves it for us to fill in this tabula rasa.
Apart from interludes of ASMR videos and footage of other World’s Fair participants, Schoenbrun concentrates on an isolated Casey and her videos, shot either in her black-light-infused bedroom or out in the desolate winter woods of upstate New York, or on JLB occupying spaces in his unnervingly enormous house. When Casey’s father and JLB’s mother pop fleetingly out of the periphery for brief moments, it is with that same frisson of shock as a jump scare. The outside world is just as frightening as any paranormal activity.
This article appears in April 22 • 2022.