Fantasia 2021: WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR Review
Starring Anna Cobb
Written by Jane Schoenbrun
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is poised, I suspect, to be this generation’s The Blair Witch Project. It’s an enigmatic, elegiac, enthralling slice of horror hybrid cinema. It haunts at the margins of the forgotten and the ignored. Quasi-supernatural, its delicately doled out terrors manifest slowly yet assuredly afterward. Make no mistake, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair will possess you.
Jane Schoenbrun’s film is, at first, rather straightforward, a riff on Paranormal Activity and 2014’s ingenuous Unfriended, the movie arguably responsible for the new decade of found-footage computer monitors. Newcomer Anna Cobb stars as Casey, a young teenager in nondescript suburbia who, late one evening, participates in the World’s Fair Challenge. The rules and expectations are nebulous. Beneath her vaulted ceiling and precariously hung string lights, she pricks her finger, runs blood over her monitor, and repeats “I wanna go to the World’s Fair” three times. That’s it.
There’s additional, ancillary cohesion to Casey’s challenge. Video clips about the World’s Fair feature titles like “disassociating” or “I can’t feel my body.” Some lament having turned into plastic, and others fear the worst is yet to come. The banality of creepy-pasta thrills mold with the simply sad state of modern adolescence. Casey is desperate enough to connect to anybody by doing, well, virtually anything. Glomming onto something unpredictable and sinister for attention is better than glomming onto what’s known and remaining invisible.
We’re all Going to the World’s Fair trundles on at a sonic frequency all its own. Unconventionally haunting and frightening, it’s been one of the most buzzed-about genre releases since its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The hypnotism of Schoenbrun’s dreamscape is infectious. It’s real. This one isn’t to be missed.
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We're All Going to the World's Fair
Summary
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a haunting, nightmarish dreamscape.
