In short: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

Lonely and isolate teenager Casey (Anna Cobb) starts on an online challenge known as the “World’s Fair Challenge”. Apparently, after a couple of repetitions of “I want to go to the World’s Fair” and the spilling of a couple of drops of blood, one can expect changes in one’s life. Which, obviously, are documented on the internet (with up to fifty viewers, in Casey’s case). A late middle-aged man going by the handle of JLB (Michael J Rogers) begins contacting Casey, purporting to be very concerned by her experiences and by videos that become increasingly intense and self-destructive.

There’s little of an actual plot to Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair but that’s not at all to the detriment of the film at all. In fact, a straightforward plot wouldn’t at all fit a film that is as much concerned with the ambiguity of human relations in our part of the internet age as this one is. The film never makes anything explicitly clear, and leaves everything open to interpretation: how much of Casey’s experiences are just her making stuff up, how much is her play-acting through a psychodrama version of her emotional struggles, how much is a “simple” genuine breakdown, how much is the Weird slithering into her life? Is JLB a man with paedophile urges, a lonely man looking for any kind of genuine human connection he doesn’t get out of the rest of his life, or both, or neither? There’s never a clear and easy answer to any of these questions, yet the film never feels vague. In fact, its representation of what is happening between and inside the characters is very clear, using internet videos, naturalistic shots of – mostly – Casey in her daily life without any human contact. It’s only that their meaning is not so clear, as it is filtered through all kinds of questions about authenticity, truthfulness, the liminality of the digital picture, and all of the interpretative baggage any viewer will bring to their interpretation of human behaviour and its meaning.

That World’s Fair at the same time manages to also be genuinely emotionally affecting is the little wonder that turns it into more than an interesting experiment about authenticity in the internet age. Cobb’s performance – as well as Rogers’s supporting part – is so powerful, the question of her character’s genuineness never gets in the way of an emotional connection, which does, of course, make We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’s meditation on mediated connections and loneliness even more powerful.