Fantasia Fest 2021: ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,’ ‘Tin Can,’ and ‘Baby, Don’t Cry’

With Fantasia Fest 2021 in full swing, we here at B-Sides & Badlands have already uncovered several feature-length horror films that are to die for. Literally. Early favorites like Agnes, writer/director Mickey Reece’s latest genre-flipping nightmare (read our full review here), saddle up against some forthcoming releases we’re itching to discuss. Seriously, there are so many incredible stories being told this year; there are downright frightful ones and ones that’ll make you question your entire existence.

Alongside our full review coverage, we will also be highlighting numerous other features in bite-sized capsule reviews. In our first installment, we journey into the hellscape of the internet and through an apocalyptic world before dealing with a little bit of folk-horror-tinged excitement.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun sucks you into the dark and slimy underbelly of the internet. Identifying as non-binary, Schoenbrun winds through the overgrown weeds of identity, particularly as one comes of age and not only must juggle real-life self-actualization but online persona. They draw upon their own experiences of sharing their own fictional horror stories on a popular message board, soon finding friendship with an older man simply known as WAJ. It was a transformative experience that they pour directly back into the film’s patchwork narrative, often feeling like a found footage flick blended with mumblecore.

In her first feature film role, Anna Cobb stars as Casey, a teenage girl struggling to understand herself in the digital and real worlds. She turns to uploading videos as a way to explore herself, her dysphoria manifesting through a viral role-playing game. “I want to go to the world’s fair,” she repeats three times with the hopes of plunging into a mysterious, unrelenting fantasy. What follows is a unique sort of skin-crawling expedition, underscored in the way Schoenbrun picks through dysphoria that’s intensely personal and moving — slicing to the core of what many LGBTQ+ individuals experience at some point in their journey. The camera work whittles into the back of the skull, as much as Casey’s slow descent into the game. Her trustt sidekick and stuffed animal Po in tow, Casey mounts a brave and winding trek into her own identity and what that means for the person she’s destined to become. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair defies expectation, a true and masterful embodiment of queerness. It’s at times uneasy and frequently emotional.

Tin Can

Apocalyptic films propelled by deadly diseases just hit a little differently these days. Whether it’s Brain Freeze, another Fantasia favorite this year, or Seth A. Smith’s sci-fi fantasy Tin Can, turning the screws on our collective anxieties seems to be all the rage. Yet Tin Can pounces far outside the confines of a story about a world-consuming fungal infection (known as Coral) — its ruin lies with one young woman, parasitologist Fret (Anna Hopkins), and her acceptance of a broken relationship with her husband John (Simon Mutabazi). Amidst her work in containing the infectious pathogen, Fret is knocked unconscious, later awakening to find herself caged inside a life extension pod and hooked up with various tubes and gadgets for breathing and sustenance.

Within the first hour, Smith keeps even the viewer in the dark, only allowing a voyeuristic view through Fret’s eyes. We don’t even get any significant glimpses of the outside world and its seemingly sterile and cold environment until well into the final act. It’s wonderfully claustrophobic, suffocatingly so, with gritty and stylish cinematography to totally hypnotize you. Intermittently, we get peeks into Fret and John’s relationship, and piece by piece, we come to learn how tumultuous and fraught with distrust it truly was. In clutching the cards so close to the vest, driven with plenty of compelling dialogue, Smith keeps you baited until the very end. It might just be the ultimate revenge film.

Baby, Don’t Cry

Created and written by Zita Bai, also the central star of the film, Baby, Don’t Cry is on the surface a coming-of-age, crime drama. But underneath its art-house layers, there lurks a story much darker, a fable framed around desire, desperation, longing, and the terrible cost one must pay to break vicious cycles. Jesse Dvorak directs, elevating Bai’s beautifully tragic story with thoughtful camerawork and nuance. Baby, as she’s called, is a 17-year-old Chinese immigrant who lives with her widowed mother on the outskirts of Seattle. She has dreams of moving to Los Angeles one day and becoming a filmmaker; most of her everyday life consists of constantly observing, a voyeur moving quietly through the halls or peering around trees, only getting glimpses of actual existence through her vintage camcorder.

When she meets Fox (Vas Provatakis), a tattooed ne’er-do-well she first films while waiting for the bus, she’s immediately entranced by his rebellious spirit. It’s a kinship in many ways, both struggling to cope with and move on with their lives. Swiftly, the two are caught in a web of their own creation, sticky with doubt, lies, and even infidelity. But they’re like planets orbiting one another, the gravitational pull is so strong they couldn’t possibly sever such ties. A disastrous psycho-drama, the film chronicles the natural order of things — they crash into one another, soon rending apart again, and then knotted back together even tighter. The relationship is toxic, but they have little else in which to hope. There is, perhaps, a folk horror element oozing even deeper into the film’s tendons, but the messaging is never quite has explicit or vibrant as the imagery with which Dvorak paints. Even more, Bai’s oddball performance is charming, devastating, and mesmerizing. While the viewer may never quite understand the themes, it’s worth a price of admission on style and composition alone.

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