Nothing I’ve seen has captured the unusual expertise of being a teenage lady on the web as completely as new indie horror film We’re All Going to the World’s Honest.
It faucets into a really particular kind of teenage dysphoria, one the place identification 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 manner 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 residence, 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 Honest, 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 try the ‘World’s Honest Problem’. It is a YouTube viral development that includes 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’s going to start to change.
Based mostly 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 sport, proper? However as Casey begins to report her personal findings to her viewers in regards to 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 obtained melancholy
You would not anticipate a horror film from 2022 to carry again the times of AOL and ICQ, however the feelings are the identical. Being a teenage lady in these early days of the web was liberating and empowering in a manner that was intoxicating. It was earlier than TikTok and YouTube, when websites have been largely plain textual content, chatrooms flourished and webcams have been remarkable in a standard household residence. You is perhaps 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 ladies that liked books and wrote unhealthy 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 have been turning into mighty sea monsters.
Whereas We’re All Going to the World’s Honest may be very a lot in regards to the web of now, recreating that feeling of ignoring your physique’s pleas for sleep to let some streaming web site pour countless movies into your eyeballs. It completely distills that feeling of teenage transformation. As Casey uploads quite a lot 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 abruptly turns into the opposite. It additionally took me again to that point whenever you abruptly notice males do not see you as a baby anymore, however one thing else, which was each thrilling and terrifying. On-line within the late ’90s you could possibly 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 residence.
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 function of the rescuer.
Hiding simply past that although, like some mid-’40s Slenderman within the woods, is the information that in the event that they have been to satisfy 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 have 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 in case you could not simply disappear with the press of a mouse, change your deal with, and be again as a completely new lady in minutes.
The true casanovas would possibly current you with the chatroom equal of a rose, @}–,–’–. In personal messages, the lads that needed to speak about our sexual expertise, how they needed to “cybersex” with us, to ask us questions we solely understood as a result of we might learn obtained maintain of mother’s bonkbuster novels, have been 10 a penny. Those that have been stranger and scarier have been those that began that manner after which rapidly descended into confessions about their wives, their jobs, their kids, swearing we have 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 college buses and playgrounds anyway.
Within the film, JLB looks like a stand-in for each man referred to as Fred who needed me to inform them it was all going to be OK. Everybody needs to shock you with filth whenever you’re an adolescent lady, 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 stunning.
For teenage ladies, for girls, for anybody the world needs 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 Honest have already occurred with Slender Man, whereas hoaxes just like the Momo problem 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 guardian intervenes past a single indignant rebuke shouted up the steps, no mates 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 Honest Problem.
No matter your gender identification, age, or familiarity with social media tendencies, We’re All Going to the World’s Honest needs to be important viewing for horror followers. Past its private resonance for the ICQ veterans amongst us, it is one of many few motion pictures in regards to 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.
In the long run 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 identification there, or within the movies she makes. She’s nonetheless constructing it one thought at a time, and you may solely ever see what she needs you to see.
