Parents' Guide to We're All Going to the World's Fair

Nonbinary filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's feature directing debut is a haunting, deeply affecting blend of experimental horror and coming-of-age, unironically exploring connection in an online world. While many other movies about the internet and social media have ranged from satires and dark comedies to thrillers, We're All Going to the World's Fair is more interior, more in tune with human emotional suffering. It definitely has an insider's knowledge of the online community, and the various videos Casey watches ring eerily true, plus they're artistically fascinating and often genuinely creepy. A video of a whispering woman urging a viewer to "go back to bed" after a nightmare may have been intended to soothe, but it's really quite unsettling. However, it's the humans in the movie -- only two of them appear on-screen, not counting the content creators in the viewed videos -- who set the real tone.

The man, JLB, occupies an enormous space -- the camera follows him as he paces a spacious home -- but still crumples from loneliness in front of his computer screen. Casey's safe space is brilliantly designed, both childlike and grown up, clean and cluttered, vast and constricting, and she never seems to fit, either physically or spiritually. Casey is always alone on-screen, and newcomer Cobb gives a bold, vulnerable, and deeply committed performance as a sad teen who likes horror and isn't comfortable speaking to others. (Witness the moment in which she dances and sings a homemade song called "Love in Winter," pausing during the bridge to let out a soul-shattering primal scream.) Yet perhaps the real success of We're All Going to the World's Fair lies in its title. It's not just JLB and Casey battling their demons ... it's all of us.