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🎙️ EPISODE 611: 12.02.22
This movie has a really subtle power which, at times, feels like a trick. It could've easily been another ho-hum computer screen film, but writer-director Jane Schoenbrun makes the bold choice to peel away, judicially, presenting the God-cam to offset the flat tabs, mouse clicks, and windows of the digital realm. This is a real person in the real world. Casey (played by Anna Cobb in her debut role). Casey's surroundings are spacious. She lives near an Auto Zone. It's the perfect counterpart to the seemingly free and endless yet ultimately claustrophobic and confining online life she chooses or — rather — feels compels to become a part of. It's a movie about the dissociation that occurs from being too online and detached from 'real' life, as much as it one about taking up amateur video editing as a hobby. And the sick, thin line between the two...
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It focuses on the content creators of the world who are essentially making nothing for no one, documenting a life where nothing is happening to an audience who, by and large, barely cares. The 'game' they all play is simply connective tissue — how you get 7 views instead of 0 — it's just a frame for this nothingness. By the time we're introduced to a second character of note, JLB (that mythical and literal one in a billion who takes notice) —
Beyond the Black Rainbow's Michael Rogers — we're ready for the really horrible or horrific stuff in this HORROR movie to start happening. But the tension exists only in that aforementioned nothingness, and also what Schoenbrun withholds, which is specific and massive. (e.g., Who is the lady in the background of JLB's mansion, billed only as ???? in the credits?) It would have been easy to make this middle-aged man the monster, appropriate and accurate even. But
We're All Going to the World's Fair is not an easy film.
Buoyed by an excellent and elastic Alex G soundtrack, the perspective fully shifts from Casey to that of JLB's in the end. The audience is left with a rather sweet and happy anecdote of how things wound up IRL for these characters. But the horror shines through in how all of this is almost certainly a lie, more internet role-play from the mind of a lonely person lost at sea online. It's not that it's nefarious or even ill-willed. It's how it's so clearly a stand in for nothing. And that's some real scary shit.
We're All Going to the World's Fair is a 2021 American coming-of-age horror drama film directed, written, and edited by Jane Schoenbrun. The film stars Anna Cobb in her debut role and Michael J. Rogers. David Lowery served as an executive producer. The film had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and was then released in U.S. theaters by Utopia and streaming on HBO Max. It was released on January 31, 2021.
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