Somewhere deep beneath the title wave of repetition, flat characterization, and woefully unsubtle allegory, is a tight thriller about trauma that could have been.
After witnessing a patient’s gruesome suicide, Dr. Rose Cotter’s (Sosie Bacon) life is turned upside down by the sinister appearance of the ubiquitous ‘smile’ of the film’s title. The strange and violent occurrences pile up, setting Rose on a collision course with the haunting memory of her mother’s suicide.
Right, so in the interest of transparency it seems correct to drop the flowery prose and say that this film is quite stupid. Its premise is the best thing about it. A premise in execution that can be summed up by the conclusive metaphor of bludgeoning yourself to death with a hammer. Following the suicide, Rose experiences hallucinations, and creepy weird shit happens (dead cat birthday present). Her partner Trevor (Jessie T. Usher) and her sister Holly (Gillian Zinser) abandon her with somewhat minor provocation. Naturally, when our loved ones start acting oddly our first instinct is to cut them out of our lives! I could buy this symbolically for the isolation of traumatic stress. However, it’s mostly used as a plot device that abjures the script from the task of characterization in numerous endless and repetitive scenes of Rose trying to convince her loved ones to listen to her.
Rose eventually allies with a police detective who does believe her. Joel (Kyle Gallner), a cardboard cut-out of the finest variety, is the generic pre-requisite for Rose’s investigations. Then there’s Dr. Desei (Kal Penn) Rose’s supervisor at the hospital. Dr. Desei is so devoid of life he could have been played by a dead pot plant. His lines consist wholly of (repetitive) scenes where he tells Rose to take a rest. The scares are repetitive too. Characters smile that evil smile and then do something fucked up. Over and over and over again. It’s difficult to understand why this film needed to be nearly 2 hours long when one considers its totally tapped for ideas after about 30 minutes. As a vehicle to explore the real-world effects of trauma it could have been so much more. It’s a rich topic, universally relatable, endlessly frightening, and sometimes life affirming. What we have instead is a hammy not-so-scary festival of never-ending cynicism and repetitive scenes topped off by an ending that might make you want to become unalive yourself. If the teaser trailer for Smile 2 is any indication, the sequel is offering more of the same.
The script is unclear as to if this film is a social satire, a black comedy, a romantic comedy, or a Harry Potter movie.
Writer director Kobo Libii’s debut feature The American Society of Magical Negroes is an oddity, not least due to its unfortunate title. Yarn arts artist Aren (Justice Smith) is recruited to join a magical secret society, the denizens of which possess the power to make white people feel good. This profession apparently involves a lot of crotch grabbing during moments when their male clients find themselves glamoured into relaxation. Aren is a sad sack with no self-esteem. He huddles on the periphery – held back by both himself, and an undercurrent of racial prejudice. Aren’s journey is one to reconcile these two barriers to self-actualization. Which is all very well and good, if not trite. Aren meets a girl at work, Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), engendering a love-triangle between the two and work buddy Jason (Drew Tarver). There’s some plot salad about the tech company they all work for over “racial recognition” software, interspersed with scenes of the magical society meeting at headquarters. The whole thing feels weirdly mashed together. The tone of the film is topsy-turvy, and its genre mashups are all over the place. The film cannot decide if it is a social satire, a black comedy, a romantic comedy, or a harry potter movie. The set design and cinematographic presentation of the magical headquarters appears ripped from the bedroom of a Potter-obsessed dark academic – festooned with mahogany furniture and orange mood-lighting. There’s even a vintage pocket watch.
The trope of the magical negro is one that has appeared in many films. The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Green Mile being two examples’ millennials are no doubt familiar with, and the film references them. The critique of the magical negro character is that he is more plot device than character, serving only to illuminate the character-arc of his white friend, whomever that may be while having no arc of his own. The film expresses same when explaining the rules of the story world – that black people must only display as much blackness as makes whites comfortable. It somewhat amusingly drops the stories of other character’s arcs in reference to its source idea.
Surely, the absurdity of such a trope is worth exploiting for satirical comedy. This film sort of does that, but it’s not really able to deal with the undercurrent of darkness. The trope is born of a tentativeness to fully embrace the other and represents a dogmatic refusal to understand others on their own terms. Aren surely wants to be understood on his own terms. The film concludes when he disrupts his boss’ spurious MeetBox web address and delivers a speech on his right to be respected as a fully capable human being. This is the sort of literal-mindedness plaguing the film. The best parts of occur at the magical headquarters – where the actual issues it wants to address are couched in the politics of their society. But those issues are siloed in those scenes, then Aren is sent out to bumble about, talking about his feelings. It is very slow, losing steam about twenty minutes in, followed by the agonizing rom-com diversion between Aren and Lizzie, interrupting any hope that this film knows what it’s trying to say. It’s not very funny, it’s really cutesy, and the script is a nightmare.
The impression one comes away with is that the film possesses all the complication of a child’s fantasy film. It cannot wield the satirical implications of the material, falling back on genre tropes and crappy tech villain plot lines. When all is said and done Aren takes a reinvigorated interest in becoming a professional yarn artist, everyone apologies to everyone else, and they all skip away. Now, don’t let the hammy coda kick you on the way out.
There is nothing worse then an unserious film taking itself too seriously. Civil War has all the quality of a mid-tier episode of The Walking Dead.
It has been a long time since the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, and Hal Ashby, et al, were on hand to make searing artworks on the hypocrisies of the day. American political cinema of the 1970’s and 80’s was a beast. Take Private Joker (Matthew Modine) in Full Metal Jacket when he stares down the camera to tell us about all the “exotic” people of an ancient culture he has come to kill. The irony of his words cut like a knife through post-Vietnam America. Then there is the slow-zoom out in the final scene of All the Presidents Men. It presents a titillating tableau: Nixon’s inaugural ceremony blares on the television while Woodward and Bernstein bang out his downfall on their typewriters. Sidney Lumet’s Network lampooned greedy TV execs, so desperate for a bloody scoop that they onboard a murderous domestic terrorist group. These films are powerful because they make powerful statements about politicians, war, American myth, journalism, and the discursive power of screen media. Moreover, they’re not afraid to make those statements. They exist on a continuum of thoughtful cinema that bypasses partisan nonsense and cuts to the very core of our human concerns in the 20th century: the difference between war and murder; truth and lies; news and a paid fabrication.
I say all this to juxtapose these earlier masterpieces of political cinema to the lukewarm offerings of the 21st century: Alex Garland’s Civil War. Civil War is so toothless, sloppy and risk adverse that it says nothing at all. And I don’t think it’s because the film doesn’t want to make a statement, I think the film is too stupid to come up with one. It’s capitalistic excess at its very worst: a film trying to take advantage of a very specific cultural moment while offering no salient commentary or satire. It’s less a political cinema than a reactionary one.
Not only does Civil War embody no memory of its political forebears, it presents itself as a road movie with barely a concept of a road movie. A group of photojournalists must drive to Washington D.C. in time to document the “Western Alliance” capture of the U.S. president. Each situation they encounter on the road is more anonymous than the last: a gas station full of rednecks holding faceless hostages; commando Jesse Plemons waving a gun over a mass grave of more faceless people; a booby-trapped Santa’s Village.
Garland misses a vital and obvious opportunity by merely placing this film on the road with no impression of American road films. Get Wim Wenders on the horn. Think of Paris, Texas, where the road imagery links the viewer to Travis’ (Harry Dean Stanton) fractured family and identity. Think of Thelma and Louise where the characters encounter people and situations that directly reference their actions and the themes of the movie. This is basic stuff. The characters in Civil War mostly encounter random things that have anything to do with them. No one is making choices. The bones of the story have osteopenia: the characters are just driving to D.C. and running into stuff. Is there some grandiose symbolism regarding political polarization, new screen media, the United States, and Santa’s Village that I am missing here? Doubt it.
The characters are not much better. Lee (Kirsten Dunst), saddled with a perpetual look of determination, plods through the film, dispensing oh-so-adroit wisdom to the ingénue la photographie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). The other leads make even less of an impression, and the characters who die are just red shirt inserts designed to take bullets. Such missteps lower the stakes in a film where everything should be at stake. Civil War also cannot handle a bit of logic surrounding its most important story objects. Why is Jessie shooting and hand developing 35mm film in a war zone when she doesn’t have to? Why is she shooting with that camera at night? Surely, both of these are suboptimal uses of her time as a photo-journalist. Half her pictures would be blurry and under exposed. The object negates its own meaning if you can’t imagine why it’s there in the first place.
And it just goes on like that. It might take a leap of logic to imagine what sort of militia force would let journalists take photos of them murdering unarmed people. You may then ask yourself why such blood thirsty cretins wouldn’t just murder the journalists too. Couple these preposterous scenarios with very bland filmmaking and you might have the most forgettable political thriller ever made. It looks like an advertisement. So many shots are in shallow focus and also in the dark. If that’s what you’re doing, why not just shoot the whole movie on an iPhone? It’s cheaper.
What is the consequence? How are the actions of the characters driven by an engagement with media? The entire point of critiquing journalism in a film such as this is because it is a matter of tremendous consequence. But here, visually and narratively, the audience has nothing to grab on to. Garland did not have to take a partisan stance in order to give his film thematic heft. Not being American, he was in a unique position to do so. Instead, he coyly denies engagement even of the allegorical variety. The “Western Alliance” – a partnership between California and Texas – lets us know that, not only is this film unserious, it’s also unaware of opportunities for black comedy since it seems totally unaware how funny that is. There is nothing worse than an unserious film taking itself too seriously. Civil War has all the quality of a mid-tier episode of The Walking Dead.
Why do we accept these mediocre thunk pieces?Is there nothing better on TV? There is something deeply cynical and unethical about taking something as serious as a nation’s ideological divide and turning it to pablum. The central question of the film is “What kind of American are you?” the implication being that regardless of the answer to that question, everyone asked it is indeed an American. That’s about the only thing that matters: getting Americans to buy movie tickets. Civil War is at best a lazy capitalization on a cultural moment, and at worst totally stupid.
In Cold Blood, based on Truman Capote’s 1964 true crime novel, concerns the real-life tragedy that befell the Clutter family at their Kansas farmhouse in November 1959. Intent on robbery, convicts Perry Smith (Robert Blake), and Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson) broke into the family’s home and shot them all to death.
With unspeakable tragedy to mind, the film opens in expressionistic style. Hyper-relational editing links the movements of the Clutters with the movements of the killers – recording a frantic count-down to the inevitable violence. The film loses steam following the murders. The Clutters, and their town of Holcomb, are mostly absent from the rest of the film. We are left with a standard procedural as Alvin Dewey (John Forsyth) investigates the crime, and the killers cross the border to Mexico, before returning to America once again. The third act is very short, skips the judicial process, and ends with Perry and Dick’s executions.
Blake and Wilson give very entertaining performances as Perry and Dick. Wilson channels a raw, disordered energy: one laced with discrete moments of absolute control. He is most effective at the height of a deception. Blake embodies the Perry Truman Capote described – a man poisoned by childhood neglect, deceptively naïve, and dangerously prone to random acts of violence. Yet these two are not enough to sustain the picture at nearly two and a quarter hours. Director and screenwriter Richard Brooks removed a tremendous amount of material concerning the aftermath of the killings in Holcomb among the Clutter’s friends and neighbours. These are some of the most compelling parts of the story, and constitute its comparative structure – between the safe, law-abiding citizens of Holcomb, and the desperate underbelly of America. Because of the way the story is structured – with all the tension occurring at the beginning of the film, and the identity of the perpetrators known to the audience – the film struggles to maintain tension in the absence of the novel’s commentary on the resultant social tension in Holcomb. Even so, In Cold Blood features a few stunning shots. In his penultimate scene, right before he is to be executed, Perry gives a speech on all the things that lead him to such a meeting with eternity. He is framed in close up, his head next to a window where rain falls heavily outside. The light reflects off the rain drops, bathing the side of his face in phantom tears of light and shadow.
The trouble with In Cold Blood is that the adaptation doesn’t work very well. It over empathizes with the killers, and leaves Holcomb out for the remainder. It lacks a gravitational understanding of the crime, such as in the opening scene. Images of the Clutters are overlaid with an idyllic instrumental soundtrack, which comes off as tremendously hokey, when it could have been satirical, considering we barely hear about them, or the town again. Its last-minute speechifying at the gallows over the uselessness of the death penalty feels paltry and way-too-late considering the rest of the screenplay denied itself the opportunity to explore those themes relative to a wider whole. Even so, excellent performances, and some beautiful photography make In Cold Blood worth a watch.
Some films bother me for months. Not because of anything represented or said, but because I feel as if there is some key point about it I have not fully understood. I usually express that as not knowing what a film is “about” – much to the amusement of those around me. I think what I mean is that I’m not sure what mechanism the film in question has provoked ambivalence in me. The Zone of Interest is my latest entry. I walked out of the theatre feeling… unclean. I chalked it up to the way the film conveyed its message by way of flippancy – like Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) putting on lipstick stolen from the incoming prisoners of Auschwitz. The film embodies a refusal to see in every sense. Even the photographs of Hitler do not look out toward the room. A film that formulates itself around the aesthetics of visual silence is a tremendous experiment indeed, and no artist should be faulted if the experiment fails, as I think it does in The Zone of Interest. If the purpose of this film is to convey the aesthetics of evil, bound up by an aesthetics of silence writ in a refusal to see in the cinematic sense, and link that to the psychology of man, the film has failed because it itself refuses to see what makes up men.
The Zone of Interest cultivates its aura of uneasy disgust by keeping the camera away from the characters. There are very few eyeline matches, or close-ups. Characters sleep in twin beds. The doubling motif is common but somewhat subtle. The static cameras in the house convey little logical space. The camera flips itself during key moments to mirror the scene and reflect the dual action at play. Quiet moments of expression like this dot the film and occur most acutely during a rare tracking shot across the garden with Hedwig and her mother. Characters don’t really see themselves in mirrors – a pointed stylistic turn that keeps them out of the realms of vision.
Such is to say: they cannot see beyond themselves to the horrifying events occurring just beyond the garden wall. Only the camera really knows what is happening. Which is sort of the problem. Everything has been outsourced to a camera-eye that assumes a specious gaze as one of history. One of the few eyeline matches occurs at the very end of the film – when Höss is walking down dark staircases during a Nazi gala and dry heaving every few steps. He stops and looks up at the camera – at us – and the scene cuts to a door revealing real footage of staff maintaining the Auschwitz Museum.
Such a historical gaze is assuming that the Höss family had some measure of capability to recognize what was happening and refused to do so. But that assessment totally misunderstands the nature of evil, and what we mean by the “banality of evil”. Because the banality of evil is not a refusal to see, it is a refusal to know there is anything to see because the psyche has been so captured. Evil becomes a way of life, and a reason to live. In 1945, with the allies closing in and defeat assured, the dregs of Nazi high command ordered the German people to fight to the last child – such was their dedication to the horror they wrought upon the world. Evil then becomes a question of the epistemological origin of emotion and action. The Zone of Interest is less concerned with the implications of that reality, and more concerned with a cinematographic exercise that seeks to comprehend evil as something without humanity behind it – turning the camera into an objectif that bears itself up as a documentarian of concept – but such is an unattainable vision – a mismatch between story and form.
There is a total unreality to this film that is not native to its subject matter. The hyper excited formalism – there to embody the implicit evil of humanity – is much tamer than if the film had complicated our spectatorship by asking us to empathize with them. Some of it feels too much like a joke sometimes – like when one of the Höss sons is playing with human teeth in his room. It’s so winky – as if to say, “yes you are watching a film about the Commandant of Auschwitz”. It relies too much on recognizing the knowledge we have, and referencing things we know occurred, and can contextualize – like the ash from the camp furnaces being used to fertilize the Höss’ garden. The film treats its images as things that can reference a reality beyond themselves. As such they can only be understood on those terms. The image of the ash fertilizer means nothing if the viewer does not know the history behind it. In fact, it’s difficult for me to say how much sense the film would make to a person with no knowledge of WWII or the Holocaust. So, the film itself becomes an obscure object perpetuating the very refusal to see it portrays. It wants to say: “evil people are not ‘somewhere else’, they are right here. They live in houses, and they eat off plates.”
Yet the aesthetic make-up of Zone does not speak to that beyond the superficial.
Zone fails to bear up in respect of its subject matter because it does not comprehend the characters as real people – only avatars of history. In order to understand evil, we must understand people. Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s German-language Hitler (Bruno Ganz) in the bunker film – was powerful, and controversial, because it treated its subject like a real person. It complicated our spectatorship not by winking, or showing us gratuitous atrocities, but by looking at the nature of human psychology. All men are capable of great evil and that is the thing we need to comprehend, but Zone’s camera pre-emptively negates that possibility. The characters cannot even see each other.
It is notoriously difficult to make a film about the Holocaust. How can cinema possibly comprehend the totality of man’s unstoppable, mechanistic, cruelty to man? I’m not so sure it can. I commend Glazer for trying. The filmmaking in Zone is virtuosic, and it will stand up on that alone. But as an entry into the canon of Holocaust cinema it leaves much to be desired.
“Men” is a feast for the eyes, but not for the mind.
It is easy to forgive certain films, especially horror films, that display a certain lack of expertise. That is: well intentioned film that fall a little south of what constitutes a robust story, or cohesive thematics, but makes up for it with some rollicking good horror. Barbarian (dir. Zach Cregger, 2022) immediately comes to mind. Then there are films like Men. Men is so stylish, yet so devoid of original thought that one comes away from it wondering how exactly everything went so terribly wrong.
Harper (Jessica Buckley) is haunted by the suicide of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu). Like most haunted people, Harper decides to go heal herself at an isolated manor house in rural England. Surely a reasonable decision. Things start off just fine. The house is cozy, and the landscape is lush and quiet. The owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), notes the fine pub, just yonder, in the village. Things take a turn when Harper ventures out on a walk. The creep factor is ramped up to eleven during an extended scene where Harper stumbles upon an old tunnel where she happily harmonizes with herself by making echoes. Suddenly, a naked man appears at the other end of the tunnel, screaming and charging towards her. It’s a great scene, but it is rendered totally inert by what follows… which is more of the same.
It is difficult to understand what exactly this film is trying to say about trauma, about men, about women, or about anything at all.
Literally, a parade of naked men who appear and disappear with absurd regularity. The story stops and starts at the tunnel scene. From then on, the film has nothing to say: not about Harper’s inner state, or trauma in general. Harper is just traumatized and guilt-ridden. Nothing else about who she is as a person is evident. Rather, her characterization rotates around the singular event of her husband’s death. Within that framework, it is difficult to understand what exactly this film is trying to say about trauma, about men, about women, or about anything at all.
In the village Harper visits a very creepy church where she encounters more crazed men in the form of a teenager who invites her to play hide and seek, and a vicar who lays a hand on her leg and asks her how she feels about causing her husband’s death. For, surely, her refusal to allow her husband to apologize for striking her was the catalyst for his death. Or not.
Men appears to be under the impression that the experience of trauma is highly succinct, without nuance, and thematically soulless.
Maybe we would feel something of what Harper is feeling if the relationship with said husband had any, you know, background information. Instead, it appears that Harper was born on the day of her husband’s death. Born, apparently, into a world populated only by weird, hostile men whose favoured pastime is being naked and staring at her. Men appears to be under the impression that the experience of trauma is highly succinct, without nuance, and thematically soulless. Once you’ve had one encounter with a creepy naked dude, perhaps you’ve had them all.
*SPOILER AHEAD*
The film culminates in a wacky denouement wherein a series of (yes, naked) now pregnant men give birth to a bunch of other naked pregnant men who give birth to her husband. What the fuck.
That is, more or less, the extent of it. Harper feels guilty. Harper is haunted. Period. Surely, it is not that “men” are incapable of creating a nuanced horror film about a traumatized woman. One need only look to Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster, 2019) to see that certain directors don’t think the word “trauma” composes the entirety of the thematic life of a motion picture. Really, that is what makes Men’s failures so egregious. Being that it is ostensibly about feminine interiority yet experiences an alexithymic understanding of what impact such experiences actually have on a person.
Men appears to be part of a burgeoning sub-genre concerning women whose husbands have committed suicide, and the haunting that follows. The Night House (dir. David Bruckner, 2020) immediately comes to mind as a much more successful foray that maintains the individuality of the main character while also containing striking, and potent thematic visuals on loss and grief. It seems silly to even bother commentating on the visual acumen of Men because the film is so stupid. Truly, there is nothing to see here but a parade of naked dudes. No thanks.
Between its refusal to resolve narrative expectations, and the aggressive restraint on characterization, the film comes to feel like an idea for a thing to say, rather than a fully functioning motion picture.
If I were to imagine We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as a physical object in the world, I think it would be a notebook. It would be a dog-eared little number, its leatherette cover flaking away. Cheap but well loved. It would be an object filled with personality on the outside. If World’s Fair gets anything right, it’s just such an aesthetic. Beyond its fixation on a particular flavour of teen angst, World’s Fair does not work very well – using an approach that is often aggressively elliptical, and fails to take chances. Surely, this gen z tone poem was not built for me, but if it worked, that wouldn’t matter at all.
Casey (Anna Cobb) is a lonely wanderer, an isolated teenager. Her social interactions are restricted to her phone, and laptop. Nary do we see another character, friend, or foe, but from the glow of Casey’s screen. Over the course of the film, Casey becomes fixated on playing a game – We’re all Going to the World’s Fair – where players evoke some class of entity, then document the changes happening to their bodies, and consciousness, via video posts. Her activities draw the attention of a fellow player – an older man by the handle JLB.
Nothing much happens in World’s Fair. The film takes an elliptical tone, and tacitly refuses to resolve anything it brings up. Such a papery adherence to the narrative falls flat insofar it is extremely difficult to care about, or understand, Casey. Casey occupies the screen about 90 percent of the time, and yet we are not aligned with her. Her immaturity, the way she chooses to spend her time watching drivel online, coupled with a lack of character development, or other characters, makes the whole thing really very dull. It’s like that notebook with the flaking leatherette cover- but when you open it the pages are blank.
Simply, World’s Fair’s interrogations of moving image media are about as paper-thin as its narrative, and not approached very creatively.
These stylistic decisions have a point – and yes I’m aware of the horror subculture it is lampooning – in respect of moving image media, the blur between fantasy and reality, and the illusion of sociality before a screen. There’s a certain something to be said about Casey falling into the online vortex as if accessing the spirit realm, but that’s another thought-tree entirely. Simply, World’s Fair’s interrogations of moving image media are about as paper-thin as its narrative, and not approached very creatively. The audience is taken in and out of computer, and phone screens, the totalizing effect being that we’re just watching videos inside a movie.
If one considers World’s Fair in its hybridity – as a narrative occurring in both the material world, and online, one may ask why it limits itself to the surface of actual screens as the totality of its representational power. Why not exploit the lo-fi narrative to really go deep on that line between fiction and reality? It’s like the filmmaker left themselves a wide-open space to experiment but forgot to show up. Long shots of Casey staring at her laptop set a tone, but it just goes on like that. Do we really need a whole movie about what it feels like to chat with strangers on your computer late at night? The film never proves itself clever enough to subvert the aesthetics of the thing it is satirizing – which seems, to me anyway, a little bit important if your aim is to critique, or comment, or whatever. World’s Fair caves to the yawning time dilation that occurs between a depressed teenager, and the tumult of her feelings, but totally subverts its strength as a tone poem by taking itself on as an academic think-piece. Between its refusal to resolve narrative expectations, and the aggressive restraint on characterization, the film comes to feel like an idea for a thing to say, rather than a fully functioning motion picture.
Between its refusal to resolve narrative expectations, and the aggressive restraint on characterization, the film comes to feel like an idea for a thing to say, rather than a fully functioning motion picture.
The ellipticity comes out as deliberate, contrived, and joyless. The world of the film is totally uninteresting. Its narrow focus on Casey is to the exclusion of anything else, and just who is Casey? Am I supposed to believe that she knows no one, and never talks to her parents? Loneliness isn’t a personality trait. Casey’s isolation, and alienation, would feel much more immediate, pressing, dare I say, important if there were some contrasts between the world, and her subjectivity. It’s as though World’s Fair wants to say something, without saying it at all, while depriving itself of the means to say it in any case because it’s too stripped down. It falters between approaches solemnly, and humourlessly.
Or maybe I just don’t get the humour. Many who approach this film come away saying that it wasn’t made for them, and that’s why they did not like it. I think that’s stupid. People in their 30’s are not so culturally distinct from a teenager like Casey that they can’t understand the movie. Maybe the movie just isn’t very good. Maybe the movie is a debut feature by a talented filmmaker still trying to find their voice, and not a rarefied cultural object. Not yet anyway. Director Jane Schoenbrun has a film coming out this year – I Saw the TV Glow – early reviews at SXSW are positive, but some highlight similar issues to World’s Fair. In any case, TV Glow has more than one character, and I’m keen to see how Schoenbrun functions in a more dynamic cinemascape. I could surely not recommend World’s Fair but to the most fanatical lo-fi aficionados, lovers of tone poems, and those who need an entire movie about what it feels like to chat with strangers at night online. Surely, none of us film lovers got enough of that when we were Casey’s age. Time to relive it.
Cine Obscura. 