"I was a kid up later than anyone in the house, reading and writing scary things and looking for a mode of expression as a young, queer, creatively frustrated person who didn’t have many opportunities to express themselves in a way that was going to be looked at in a positive light. As a trans person who was on a very long process of coming to terms with my transness, the idea of the internet as a space to explore that through fiction, before I was ready to explore that in reality, felt very moving. When I started writing this film, I didn’t know I was trans. By the time I finished writing the film, I did know I was trans."
-Director Jane Schoenbrun
We're All Going to the World's Fair is a 2021 American coming-of-age horror film written, directed, and edited by Jane Schoenbrun. The film stars Anna Cobb in her debut role and Michael J. Rogers. teenage Casey sits alone in her attic bedroom, scrolling the internet under the glow-in-the-dark stars and black-light posters that blanket the ceiling. She has finally decided to take the World's Fair Challenge, an online BLUE WHALE style challenge, and embrace the uncertainty it promises. After the initiation, she documents the changes that may or may not be happening to her, adding her experiences to the shuffle of online clips available for the world to see. As she begins to lose herself between dream and reality, a mysterious figure reaches out, claiming to see something special in her uploads.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 90% based on reviews from 118 critics, with an average rating of 7.4/10.
A lot of folks (myself included) spend a large part of their childhood/life and would feel closer to a non-existence than an existence. I certainly spent my fair share of years feeling misunderstood, unwanted, left out, and insignificant. The internet, in all its instant messaging glory, may seem like a good solution to this problem. There's plenty of fish in the sea as they say, but there are plenty of dangers lurking in the internet's ocean. Predators, scam artists, liars, maybe even demons, I'll hide behind, painted-on smiles and witty usernames. If you go looking, you'll probably find what you're looking for, and there's no doubt whatsoever that the things you don't want will find you.
If you couldn't tell by my somewhat theatrical opening to this post, I really loved this movie. It's unquestionably a slow burn, but only because it's so fiercely focused on its characters and its mood. Tripping through various POVs and internet videos to tell its story, this is a movie that ends up being as much about the internet itself as it is about Casey. It's as deeply unsettling as it is emotional, and it's one of my favourite movies I have seen in a long time.
9/10
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