We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a creepypasta/meme-inspired internet movie that I guess would be categorized as horror. Maybe creepy, unsettling psychological study would be more accurate though. I watched it with a certain blurry-eyed detached interest… even if I came away a little underwhelmed. Which probably describes how the main character experienced the film too.

The movie is about teenage girl who takes the “World’s Fair” challenge… which is an online ritual that is said to have unknown and mysterious effects on your body and mind that you are supposed to stream online.

Probably the strangest and best/worst thing to do is watch this movie deep in the throws of your own insomniac 3am haze. The lead character seems to be suffering from either insomnia or extreme boredom and just wants something… anything… to change her world. I think that’s why she plays the World’s Fair game… not because she wants to live in a horror movie (which she claims) but because the alternative is just… boring.

And the film is otherwise about nothing much at all… a lot of long, slow scenes that don’t seem to be going anywhere. Short video clips from other users that may or may not be real, may or may not have a point. They all emulsify into a kind of creepy… pasta. Soup. Mélange of surreal weirdness.

The film is slow, a little mind-numbing, a little experimental, and probably should have both bored me to death and annoyed me. But I was neither… I was distantly engaged in the film, allowing it to take me for a late night ride to… well… to nowhere really. I wanted to give this a slightly higher score but I ultimately feel it doesn’t have anything particularly original to say.

I think, in the end, it’s a movie about sad, lonely, bored people who try to find something interesting in their lives. The way the film switches points of view in the end tells us more about the future of our teenage protagonist than anything else. Or maybe it’s just the end of someone else’s lonely story. Another take on making up one’s own reality.

But I think it’s an exaggeration to call any of this horror. Might even be an exaggeration to call it a narrative film. But I was interested, I was engaged… for most of it. I ultimately felt let down by a tepid ending that, if I’m reading it right, is still pretty thoughtful and sad.

Score: 76