One of my favorite anecdotes about film comes from Roger Ebert, from a review he wrote of the passable but forgettable Linda Blair vehicle Hell Night from 1981:
It was that legendary Chicago film exhibitor Oscar Brotman who gave me one of my most useful lessons in the art of film-watching. "In ninety-nine films out of a hundred," Brotman told me, "if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen." This rule, he said, had saved him countless hours over the years because he had walked out of movies after the first uneventful reel.
I seem to remember arguing with him. There are some films, I said, in which nothing happens in the first reel because the director is trying to set up a universe of ennui and uneventfulness. Take a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's L’Avventura, for example.
"It closed in a week," Brotman said.
"But, Oscar, it was voted one of the top ten greatest films of all time!"
"They must have all seen it in the first week."
Ennui, isolation and distance are difficult to portray in any movie, but they're particularly challenging for a horror movie. In a horror movie you have to sympathize with someone, or otherwise you're not scared when they are. The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa does this very well, in films like Pulse, in which ghosts invade the internet and destroy humanity by breaking friends apart and spreading isolation like a virus, but I'm having a hard time thinking of another filmmaker who's been able to capture the fear of loneliness so effectively, except for Jane Schoenbrun, whose debut feature We're All Going to the World's Fair is a quietly wrenching chronicle of emptiness. Emptiness of life, emotion, character, entertainment, culture. There's a treacherously thin line between a movie about vapidity and a vapid movie, which is what makes World's Fair all the more impressive. Its ability to thread this needle is thanks in no small part to Anna Cobb, the lead performer who's on screen alone for most of the film and is going to be a star.
Movies like this always risk closing in the first week. World's Fair will be discussed forever when anyone asks what 2020s American culture was like. It is not a flattering portrayal. Early scenes establish a suburban corporate graveyard marked by the husks of once-dominant Toys-R-Us-es and K-Marts. The town is in upstate New York but it might as well be in a post-nuclear wasteland. During the opening credits young Casey (Cobb) wanders like the Road Warrior. No school is mentioned: maybe it's summer, or maybe it just doesn't matter anymore. We get glimpses and hear distant voices of parents in the background, but they never really enter the picture. Casey goes home to her attic room, where she opens her Youtube channel. She announces that she's "taking the World's Fair Challenge."
We learn from glimpses of other Youtubers' clips that the World's Fair Challenge is the "scariest game of all time," based on an innocuous-looking arcade game (hints of "Five Nights at Freddy's"). Someone takes the challenge by performing a "Candyman"-like ritual in front of their computer screen. Various Youtubers report differing results: one believes his insides have been turned into a Tetris game, another turns to plastic, another's arm breaks out in an odd pattern of sores (in what turns out to be a very funny scene). We follow Casey as she documents what happens to her after she takes the challenge. At first the seeming effects are maddeningly normal and expected. Then, a stranger known only as JLB contacts her. The message: "You're in trouble."
Schoenbrun's storytelling method is fluid and inconstant but intricately balanced. Some scenes take place entirely within the screen, Unfriended-style, complete with clips of seemingly unrelated videos from other users as well scenes from TV shows and movies related to the Challenge, revealing it for the cultural phenomenon it is. But it often extends outside of the screen to give us a view of who Casey is outside of her online performance. We also meet JLB, who's revealed to be a significantly older man (played by Michael J. Rogers, from Beyond the Black Rainbow) living in what appears to be a mansion. He, like Casey, is always alone. Is he an orchestrator of Casey's fate in some way? A predator? A hero? Someone who's lonely like she is, seeking a friend? Schoenbrun allows for him to be all and none of those things.
The horror in World's Fair comes from how easily we tend to be yoked into interesting stories and swindled by interesting frauds, and how our need for connection and involvement in isolating times draw us into conspiracies and cults. But we are never quite sure who is the victim and who is the predator. Maybe neither exists. Maybe, as comedian Bo Burnham posits, they're "performer and audience melded together" as "the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform... perform[ing] everything to each other, all the time, for no reason."
Schoenbrun reveals an unsettlingly real world where this constant-performance expectation has replaced real culture. All that's left to do is mine old properties for new entertainment, to project a ludicrous mythos onto an arcade game that, we see in some clips, is painfully innocuous, primitive, and functional. At a time when most movies are repackaged versions of old IP--check the imbecilic Space Jam 2, or the umpteenth version of Batman and Spider-Man etc., or the new horror version of Winnie the Pooh that's coming soon thanks to the expired copyright--World's Fair explores the sadness in a culture that's been completely drained from all sides, has even run out of the fumes of past successes, and is now running on the fumes of past failures. To paraphrase Daniel Plainview, we're a milkshake that's been drunk up.
Many will be frustrated by World's Fair's reluctance to fit into a traditional demonic possession story. The final scenes very subtly and unexpectedly switch our sympathies. The last moments dangle catharsis and then snatch it away. There's no real end because the performance, not the resolution, is really what the characters crave. Without it, they have nothing. There have been lots of movies where the main character is possessed by a malevolent game. In this one the tragedy is that they're possessed before they play.
**** out of ****
Note: This movie contains extensive use of strobing effects. Those affected should proceed cautiously.
