Directed by Jane Schoenbrun • 2021 • United States
Starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers, May Leitz

“I want to go to the World’s Fair.” Isolated teen Casey (Anna Cobb) repeats this cryptic mantra three times into the eerie glow of her laptop screen, initiating herself into the viral World’s Fair challenge—an online horror role-playing game taking place on the dark fringes of the internet. As she loses herself deeper in the increasingly disturbing subculture of the game and its other lonely, alienated players, the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve in a hallucinatory, Day-Glo digital blur. One of the few films to truly capture the uncanny texture and existential dread of the online void, the debut feature from Jane Schoenbrun blends horror, psychodrama, and an experimental video-art aesthetic into a truly visionary coming-of-age nightmare.