We're All Going to the World's Fair (2022)

Having watching Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair it is almost impossible to say quite what I have watched.

My initial comments on Shudder were condescending, faintly praising the director doing something other than a slasher clone.  There's an implied criticism in that, suggesting (not too far below the surface) that what ever they did they did not do it terribly well.  And I imagine a lot of people watching We're All Going to the World's Fair would have left it at that.  At best, a sporadically interesting attempt at micro-budget film-making.  At worst, a near unwatchable pretentious mess.

But thinking about the film again as I tried to write this review, I found myself feeling much more positive and intrigued, about the film itself.  Its refusal to give a conventional narrative or establish a diegetic reality with observable rules prompted an intellectual response and forced me to either reject the project altogether (as I suspect many would) or engage in 'deep decoding' to arrive at an interpretation.

Casey's problems started after she was kicked out of her Kiss tribute band

Casey, a teenage girl - convincingly played by Anna Cobb - commits to a mysterious viral internet challenge called "The World's Fair."  This immediately has slightly stagey overtones, as she has to repeat her acceptance several times a la saying Bloody Mary or Candyman in front of a mirror, and then smear blood from a (viciously) pricked finger onto the screen of her computer.  She watches videos made by other participants in the challenge and records her own, recording her own mental disintegration as the challenge, or curse, or whatever it is, affects her.  She corresponds with another World's Fair tripper, JLB, who is shown to be middle-aged man, as lonely and isolated as she is.

Filmed with a tiny cast - there are only essentially two characters and most of our attention is locked on Casey - and formally challenging, We're All Going To the World's Fair, is easy to dismiss as dull, stagey, pointless or amateurish.  None of these are fair.  It's deliberate, in every sense of the word.

Virtually the whole film consists of Casey sitting in front of her computer, or videos recorded by herself or others.  Occasionally we break away from this perspective, for example in a sequence shot of Casey leaving the house, crossing the darkened yard and prowling through her father's out house, ultimately locating a shotgun.

Haters of this film - there is no way this not the work of a skilled film maker in command of the medium

The ambiguous nature of the film leaves us uncertain, however, whether moment like these represent diegetic reality, the real Casey unstaged, or are just more elaborate videos than the 'direct to camera' ones where she breaks the fourth wall?

After all, just because we scarcely see other people doesn't mean they don't exist.  Casey alone, wandering about, finding firearms?  Or Casey acting for the camera, filmed by an unseen collaborator, performing a rehearsed routine as part of her World's Fair journey?  The director - whichever one we mean here, Schoenbrun, Casey or her unseen and possibly non-existent collaborator - refrain from giving us certainty.

Perhaps a hint is given very early on, when Casey has to shed blood to 'seal the deal' and become part of the World's Fair.  The stabbing sequence seems unconvincing overdone, as she takes great care to show us the skull design on the badge she will use, and then drives the pin repeatedly into the tip of her finger.  It's clearly fake - there is a good long pause when the hand that gets stabbed is out of shot, plenty of time for whatever surrogate hand would be used to be readied - but also the unflinching ferocity feels unreal.  On first viewing, we have no idea what we are watching or what the rules are.  So we accept the way Casey repeatedly stabs her finger without even blinking as just how this girl rolls.

Apparently Casey is impervious to pain

But reflecting on it prompts me to wonder if it is meant to be deliberately slightly over-the-top, a hint from the film maker that Casey is manufacturing a fiction, not recording a reality.  After all, the staging reminds me of this moment of another great film about deception and how human beings just aren't what they seem:

"This, for instance, isn't Kurt Russell at all, it's imitation."

John Carpenter gleefully described how the 'hand' holding the petri dish is a prosthetic, to allow them to squirt blood up when MacReady hits genuine Thing cells.  And if it is good enough for John, it's good enough for Casey.  The finger we can see her stabbing so enthusiastically isn't the actress's real finger, obviously.  But what if it isn't even supposed to be Casey's real finger, but a fake?

Similarly, Casey announces that her stuffed animal Po (or Poe?) her beloved childhood companion, will be taking the challenge alongside her.  It comes across as gauchely childish, making us think of Casey as very naive and vulnerable, scared and out of her depth, a child in the big bad online world.  

Later on in the film, Casey - now apparently partying hard at the World's Fair - dismembers the luckless Poe.  It the nearest this emotionally reserved piece comes to visceral excitement as we experience shock - for a plushie - and then a surge of pity for Casey as she comes to and sees what she has done ... But isn't it all too convenient?  It's the sort of shoddy, emotionally manipulative symbol-mongering film makers love.  Its exactly the sort of thing, in other words, Casey would have come up with if the whole World's Fair exercise was contrived.  And just like the skull badge she uses to hurt herself with is just a bit too good to be true, so is having a childhood toy named after Edgar Allen Poe.

After all, many of the video's Casey consumes are clearly, hilariously fake - the boy pulling movie tickets out of cuts in his flesh - and the videos she makes in turn are equal part stagey and performative as they are unsettling. 

By the same token the end of the film - 'resolving' the narrative with an extended voiceover by JLB - might be an admission that the film maker had no real control over what was happening, and the whole 'film' is really just a sorry mess.  Or it might be the ultimate reality of budget restraints or other factors intervening in the film making process.  But what if it is deliberate?  What if, having considered all options and without and constraints, this is how the director wanted to end the film?  What would that mean for our negotiation of meaning with this ineffable text?

In this reading JLB and Casey have created their fictional text within the film we have watched.  The ending suddenly becomes sinister, rather than tone deaf.  Why would JLB be posting this defensive voiceover, assuring us that his intentions were good, Casey is safe and now understands he was right all along?  In an everything-is-on-the-level reading, this is precisely what happens, and it makes almost no sense.  Why would she contact him after a year has passed?  Why would he bother telling us?  Why would we care?  It's senseless, and if that is the intended reading then the film truly is the work of a klutz and this blog should be burned for suggesting otherwise.

So the ending only makes sense if there is a sub-strata of meaning here.

I played with the idea that JLB was the online creep Casey accuses him of being in a fit of rage - Hell, he fits the profile, being male and on the internet.  Perhaps in the interim between their rupture and his voiceover he pursued Casey through other means, harassed her, possibly murdered her (why not?) and then - rather like MacBeth leaving a note on Duncan's body saying it wasn't him - protests his innocence to us.

But this requires him to have a Godlike omnipotence, a relationship with the audience and, dude, you've only been on our screens for like three minutes.  We've watched Casey for almost an hour and a half and she doesn't talk to us.  JLB would have to be a special level of crazy for that interpretation to work.  And it requires a traditional narrative structure that is at odds with everything else that happens in the film, because suddenly we're expected to accept the validity of these traditional film tropes (transparent camera, voiceover) as in a film where everything else appears to have been generated within the film world/

The earlier anomalous 'cut aways' to JLB need to be considered.  How do they appear in a film that is largely made from footage supposedly produced by the people within the world of the film?  They are stylistically different, simple filming of the 'real' JLB in his house, without pretending to be his own production.  And they are disruptive - the film is centred on Casey.

Nothing says 'wholesome' and 'I'm here to help' like a middle-aged dude staring into a teenage girl's bedroom

But we are given occasional these glimpses of the user JLB in his own home, presumably miles away from Casey.  It jars.  It's either a monstrous failure of nerve on the part of the film makers - at odds with their steadfast refusal to embrace conventional narrative politics - or it is a deliberate ploy perpetrated by the characters within the film world.  And get the carefully constructed mise-en-scene of the shot above - like the badge and the ragdoll, it's just a bit too good to be true.  What if it isn't? What if Casey and JLB are not two separate nodes on the web, miles apart, but collaborators creating a text together, the ultimate World's Fair video?  Perhaps JLB is the unseen camera person following Casey to the out house to find the gun?

Our own attempt to negotiate what is 'real' and what is 'fiction' mirror Casey's quest to understand her experiences, except our uncertainty is genuine, and hers might be genuine, might be false, or a fusion of the two.  Or it might be genuine but consciously or subconsciously denied, or might be denied but truly genuine.  It's fun when you mix the words up.

Ultimately, we have no idea where the 'fiction' of the World's Fair ends and 'reality' of Casey's life begins.  We don't really know if such concepts have validity, as the entire film could be a fiction constructed by the characters within the 'reality' of the film's universe, beyond the confines of the film.

And the sum total of all this rumination, this attempt to nail the jelly of film to the floor of meaning?  We're All Going to the World's Fair presents us with a world where concepts such as 'reality' and 'truth' have become meaningless, where nothing can be objectively defined, no-one can be trusted and where everything might be an elaborate hoax; where comprehension and perception become subverted to a form of fiction so densely layered we can't even articulate what we have watched any more, or what it means.

And as the title warns us, we're all going there.

That's why it's a horror film.

Star rating: ****