Nothing I’ve seen has captured the unusual expertise of being a teenage woman on the web as completely as new indie horror film We’re All Going to the World’s Truthful.
It faucets into a really particular kind of teenage dysphoria, one the place id is a malleable, shifting factor. Who you’re is a mixture of your actuality, the ‘you’ that you just create in your thoughts and the one you are designated by the strangers who discover a approach via the boundaries of your personal world. It is a feeling that time-traveled me again to the arrival of the web within the household dwelling, and all the world of strangers, communities, and fandoms that appeared immediately like a magical kingdom I might discovered behind a wardrobe.
We’re All Going to the World’s Truthful, which is out there to stream now, opens with a easy however spooky premise: Remoted teenager Casey is recording vlogs in her room and is about to aim the ‘World’s Truthful Problem’. It is a YouTube viral development that entails a Candyman-style incantation with supposedly occult outcomes. To take part she has to repeat “we’re all going to the world’s truthful,” while watching a video (which we by no means see, however lights her face ominously), after which she is going to start to change.
Primarily based on the movies uploaded by different gamers, which the movie periodically exhibits us in montages, the precise nature of how the participant is modified varies wildly, presumably based mostly on their creativity in video enhancing apps. As a result of it is all only a recreation, proper? However as Casey begins to report her personal findings to her viewers concerning the results of the sport, she’s contacted by a person referred to as JLB with a dire warning and a suggestion to assist.
You’ve got acquired melancholy
You would not anticipate a horror film from 2022 to convey again the times of AOL and ICQ, however the feelings are the identical. Being a teenage woman in these early days of the web was liberating and empowering in a approach that was intoxicating. It was earlier than TikTok and YouTube, when websites had been principally plain textual content, chatrooms flourished and webcams had been unparalleled in a standard household dwelling. You is likely to be a child with a cellphone, but it surely did not have a digital camera, and importing a photograph meant shopping for a scanner and forcing a trip image from the household album via it.
Bizarre women that cherished books and wrote dangerous poetry might thrive, creating excellent personas the place they grew to become the darlings of the chatrooms. With a cute moniker and our A/S/L, we weren’t turning ourselves into catfish, we had been turning into mighty sea monsters.
Whereas We’re All Going to the World’s Truthful may be very a lot concerning the web of now, recreating that feeling of ignoring your physique’s pleas for sleep to let some streaming web site pour limitless movies into your eyeballs. It completely distills that feeling of teenage transformation. As Casey uploads a wide range of more and more unhinged movies, it is by no means clear how a lot is pure efficiency and the way a lot is real misery, or when one immediately turns into the opposite. It additionally took me again to that point while you immediately notice males do not see you as a toddler anymore, however one thing else, which was each thrilling and terrifying. On-line within the late ’90s you possibly can get excessive on the at-a-distance consideration of individuals you by no means needed to meet, whereas nonetheless wrapped within the cotton wool of your childhood dwelling.
Casey’s sinister savior seems like each man you met in these chatrooms. Patriarchal one minute, wheedling the following, constructing as a lot of a fiction from his personal needs as any superb lie you typed right into a chatbox. He is fascinated with Casey and he or she has an influence over him at the same time as he is attempting to play the position of the rescuer.
Hiding simply past that although, like some mid-’40s Slenderman within the woods, is the data that in the event that they had been to fulfill in actual life his protecting spiel would flip into one thing else completely, and any sense of management would slip via her fingers.
Video killed the AOL star
Within the early chatrooms days, when you’d declared your A/S/L—declarations that had been taken as gospel as a result of what else was there?—it was by no means lengthy earlier than the lads within the chatrooms began to focus on you with questions or compliments or consideration, marking territory with verbal cues as if you happen to could not simply disappear with the press of a mouse, change your deal with, and be again as a wholly new woman in minutes.
The true casanovas may current you with the chatroom equal of a rose, @}–,–’–. In personal messages, the lads that wished to speak about our sexual expertise, how they wished to “cybersex” with us, to ask us questions we solely understood as a result of we would learn acquired maintain of mother’s bonkbuster novels, had been 10 a penny. Those that had been stranger and scarier had been those that began that approach after which rapidly descended into confessions about their wives, their jobs, their kids, swearing we had been the one ones that understood them. The necessity got here off them in waves, and felt extra harmful and suffocating than the sexual nonsense we heard shouted on faculty buses and playgrounds anyway.
Within the film, JLB looks like a stand-in for each man referred to as Fred who wished me to inform them it was all going to be OK. Everybody desires to shock you with filth while you’re an adolescent woman, however being requested to be the whore and the angel and the therapist by a person who is identical age as your dad was actually surprising.
For teenage women, for ladies, for anybody the world desires to berate and possess, the web world has modified and grow to be one thing else completely in 2022. The creepy ARG-inspired moments of We’re All Going to the World’s Truthful have already occurred with Slender Man, whereas hoaxes like the Momo challenge despatched dad and mom right into a pearl-clutching panic—and actually, you need to fear extra about your offspring consuming Tide Pods for clout than vaguely demonic on-line rituals.
Having a private model begins as quickly as you get your first smartphone and add a selfie. From that second there is no escape, your friends, your predators, and the world can attain you thru the web at any second of the night time or day. For Casey, there’s little or no sense of a life past the one she’s importing in chunks for her unquantified viewers. No mum or dad intervenes past a single indignant rebuke shouted up the steps, no associates cease by to giggle over the weirdness of all of it, and he or she’s not texting or scrolling via Instagram. Each her actual life and her on-line life have narrowed to focus completely on the World’s Truthful Problem.
No matter your gender id, age, or familiarity with social media tendencies, We’re All Going to the World’s Truthful ought to be important viewing for horror followers. Past its private resonance for the ICQ veterans amongst us, it is one of many few films concerning the web that does not completely embarrass itself by the tip. I might by no means need to spoil the film, but it surely by no means does what you anticipate it to, and by no means takes the simple, apparent path to its conclusion.
Ultimately we’re simply one other of Casey’s viewers, whether or not we’re seeing the movies Casey makes, her interactions with JLB, or raking our eyes throughout the bed room within the background, searching for clues to who she is away from the icy glow of her laptop computer display screen. The reality is that you just will not discover her id there, or within the movies she makes. She’s nonetheless constructing it one thought at a time, and you will solely ever see what she desires you to see.
