Grimmfest 2021

A teenage girl enters a role playing horror game using social media and attracts the attention of an older man.

Schoenbrun's feature debut is a fascinating puzzle box, confident of its intent and increasingly unsettling as it progresses.

The tale is told through a combination of online videos, mainly produced by the two protagonists and some third person observation of their offline irl lives.

Not a film that feels particularly inclined to explain itself, information is provided and its up to the viewer how they interpret it (cue responses of 'pfft, well I could do that at home')

For this viewer it was an absorbing and unsettling meditation on teenage alienation, crisis of identity and cyber grooming, amongst a myriad of other things.

You will likely either love it or hate it,.

I feel like I'm missing something based on the positive reviews from everyone else. We're All Going to the World's Fair sets up to be promising. A teenage girl becomes immersed in an online horror role-playing game. From the picture I expected it to be freaky weird. And the very opening made me think that. The first 30-minutes aren't bad. There's an eerie sense all around and we see some messed up videos from others doing the World's Fair challenge. But then nothing happens. I kept waiting for something disturbing to occur, but the rest of the movie does literally nothing. I understand the message that it's sending about how we should be careful and take things more seriously. Yet, the stakes never get high enough where I felt like our lead, Casey, was in any danger. There's a perspective from another man watching Casey and checking in on her, but he doesn't add anything to the story till the end. The music didn't work at all. We needed something off putting. Instead we got indie music with lyrics playing randomly in spots that didn't work. I'm just really disappointed, especially after one of the extremely messed up videos from another playing. If someone else was attached to the project, I think it would be better.

This movie is about a girl who likes horror movies and wants to experience what it would feel like to be in one. She doesn't have a great home life, and she doesn't seem to have any friends. She takes something called "The World's Fair Challenge." We are told that it is the internet's "scariest online horror game." She watches the video that begins the challenge, then posts videos to document how it changes her. We also see her watch videos posted by other kids who have taken the challenge. They seem like they have been messed up by the challenge. But the lead character, Casey, doesn't really change. She does a few weird things where she doesn't act like herself, but she always goes back to acting normal afterwards. She actually seems more zoned out in the first scene before she takes the challenge than she does later. An older guy takes an interest in her videos and contacts Casey. He is trying to warn her that she may be in danger. But nothing happens to her. At the end, she tells him it was just a game.