In the Flesh: We're All Going to the World's Fair

Early on in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, struggling teenage loner Casey (Anna Cobb) walks out of her house by lantern light, a quiet voyage across the snow-covered lawn to the underworld of her family’s barn. Inside, she contemplates a high-powered rifle before returning it to its case and activating a projector through which she plays an ASMR video by Youtuber Slight Sounds. At first we only hear the creator’s gentle shushing, her litany of comforting whispers telling the listener they’ve had a bad dream, but it’s okay. She’s there. She’s with them. When we do see, the spectacle is one of manufactured parasocial intimacy, a discrete unit of tender attention which can be replayed at will. There’s something frightening about it, this child in need of love and able to access it only through the intercession of a monetized online performance. The corollary to this is, of course, that without it she’d have nothing at all.

So much of writer/director/editor Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature is concerned with this kind of pseudo-personal connection, relationships mediated through the rules of an online Alternate Reality Game (ARG) or the soft-focus glow of an ASMR channel. What tools do we reach for when we can’t find intimacy in our own lives? How do lonely people cope with chronic isolation? Casey lives in fear of an unseen family member, a father or significantly older brother. His car pulling into the driveway is enough to send her hurrying upstairs to eat alone. His harsh bellow of, “It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning!” when Casey's music video wakes him prompts a plaintive “I’m sorry” painfully familiar to anyone who was or has spent time around an abused child. Precocious and awkward, Casey has no one to teach her how to move from childhood into adolescence.

The dynamic the young girl develops with much older misfit and fellow horror fan JLB (a gaunt, soft-spoken Michael J. Rogers) is complex and admirably ambiguous. JLB, unwilling to show his face on camera and immersing himself in the titular online horror ARG from an oddly childlike bedroom contained within an expansive, palatial house, is socially malformed but kind and genuinely concerned for Casey. Something about him — his awkward body language, his soft-spoken, lisping voice — suggests he may have spent a long time closeted, or that he may still be. Regardless, he represents a species of friendship to the troubled Casey, and his delicate diction renders a final monologue which might have turned saccharine in the wrong hands genuinely affecting. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a stunning directorial debut, confident and adventurous, full of tooth-grinding suspense and alive in a way few movies about the internet manage to be.