I Want to go to the World’s Fair

Spoilers for We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, like all of it.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is my favorite movie of 2022. It is probably my 2nd favorite film of the 2020s so far.

I know that’s not a popular opinion (although I am far from the only critic to rate it so highly) and ever since I saw it, I’ve been struggling to articulate what about it buried itself so deeply in my psyche. It is a quiet, often alienating film, one that resists attempts to pigeonhole it into an easy to understand genre. So what even is this film?

The easiest label, the one that sticks the fastest is a horror film. This is the label wikipedia gives it. And it certainly uses the filmic language of horror films, but I don’t know how much that actually manages to define the film. The last few years have seen the filmic language of horror films begin to pervade other genres (notably in both Shiva Baby and Spencer), simply because it’s the best way to force the audience to engage with a character’s headspace.

And We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is singularly concerned with its character’s headspace. From beginning to end, our lead Casey never shares the frame with another character, barely speaks to another human. All of our insights into Casey’s character come from her videos and the way she acts alone. We are given intense insight into her loneliness, her isolation and desire for recognition almost entirely wordlessly. And we also know another thing about her; She wants to go to the world’s fair.

By which I, of course, mean she wants to go through the World’s Fair Challenge, a little creepypasta-esque challenge, which is followed by the suggestion to “Record any changes.” This is clearly an invitation for creativity, a suggestion that you use the challenge as a jumping off point for making your own videos, telling stories your own way. There doesn’t seem to be any coherent narrative to the World’s Fair challenge, just whatever any given person feels like making under it’s auspices, much like how director Jane Schoenbrun used Slenderman as a jumping off point for their own film before this one (Which, despite having been up on Vimeo for a while, I haven’t watched yet as I didn’t want to end up writing too much about it here).

And Casey throws herself into the game. She is contacted by another player, a mysterious older man named JLB who advises her on how to make her own content for it. Except Casey’s content is…dark. Sure she runs through the usual stuff, acting like she’s possessed, talking about sleepwalking. But they begin to go deeper, into something real, into bleak monologues about killing her father or committing suicide. This culminates in a video where, doing an intense disturbing dance in blacklight facepaint, Casey obliterates a stuffed animal, one which the film went out of its way to mention Casey has had since she was an infant.

Much of the discussion I’ve had about this film has centered on the final conversation Casey has with JLB, with the moment where he breaks Kayfabe and reminds her it’s all just a game, and whether she knew that all along (as she claims) or was genuinely getting sucked in. But I think that’s the wrong point to be honing in on. Because whether she was doing it purely as an act for a video or whether some part of her believed she was compelled to do it, Casey did destroy the stuffed animal, and everything about the scene tells me that was something that genuinely mattered to her. A piece of herself lies in tatters on the floor, sacrificed on the altar of making a video for a silly online game.

And in tragic form, Casey is getting nothing back. We see the videos she’s making for the game as if they were actual YouTube videos, so we see the view counts, and they are mostly in the low double digits. No matter how much damage Casey does to herself, the world doesn’t care, the only person really watching is JLB (whose motives are ambiguous but, due to the fact that he’s an adult and she’s a teenager, suspect).

People have suggested that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is, on some level, a trans allegory, focusing on director Jane Schoenbrun’s gender idenity (Shoenbrun is nonbinary) and again, these reads tend to be surface level; Casey’s baggy clothing, her ambiguously gendered name, her clearly avoiding her father. But as a trans woman, there is nothing more trans about the film than Casey’s self destruction, her annihilating herself in a desperate attempt to please a faceless mass of people who have already rejected her.

I mentioned at the start that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair uses the visual language of horror, long camera moves through dark spaces, small claustrophobic rooms, darkness stretching away into eternity behind our subject. But there is also a sequence towards the middle that brings horror to the forefront. The sequence is a montage of other takes on the World’s Fair challenge; A schlocky little scene where a hand emerges from a computer screen to drag a man in, a bit of body horror where another man pulls fair tickets from his skin, even a brief cameo from horror YouTuber and musician NyxFears.

I like to interpret this little sequence as a direct communication between director and audience. In it we can see an acknowledgement that the film, on some level, knows what people might expect from a film with this one’s premise, and also to remind us that we’re not getting it. But it also serves to remind us of what horror usually looks like, what things are typically going bump in the night look like. And it reminds us what we get from those things looking like they usually do.

They give us comfort. Because as awful as they are, they are tangible, understandable, something that can be hidden or run from, even if it’s ultimately futile. But there is no running from the kind of isolation that leads Casey out into the dark to listen to an ASMR video in her shed to feel like someone else is there. There’s no hiding from the kind of loneliness that leaves a person grasping at their computer, desperate for any kind of connection. And I don’t think any of us, least of all Casey, can understand the need for some kind of validation that leads you to carve out a piece of yourself and destroy in the hopes that someone will watch you hurt yourself and click a like button.