Alone in her attic bedroom at night, a teenage girl pricks her finger, smears the blood across her laptop screen, and says the words three times.

She is taking the World's Fair Challenge, an online horror game that promises to change your body and your mind. Nothing may be happening to her. Everything may be. She starts filming herself to find out.

Anna Cobb, in a startling first performance, plays Casey, a lonely kid who watches other players' videos of skin turning to plastic and arms overtaken by fungus. She begins documenting her own symptoms, real or performed or imagined, for a faceless man who has started to watch her too closely.

By the end, the film turns into something else, and this is where it either loses or strengthens its hold on the audience. It becomes an indictment of our entangled, isolated modern culture. A cold look at the assumptions we make about strangers online. Mostly, it becomes a call for compassion and connection.

WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR (2021) is the directorial debut of Jane Schoenbrun. Schoenbrun has said it was an attempt to describe the indescribable feeling of dysphoria, of dissociating from one's own body.

A micro-budget production made primarily in an attic, this film has more to say about the horrors of the human condition than a year's worth of Hollywood jump scares.