In the late 19th Century, Luciano (Gabriele Silli), a drunkard, falls in love with Emma (Maria Alexandra Lungu), the daughter of a shepherd, in a remote Italian village. Emma's father, Severino (Severino Sperandio), an aristocrat, forbids him from seeing her, though. Making matters worse, Luciano angers a prince (Enzo Cucchi) who prevents him from crossing through a road that's considered a right of passage. Exiled to Argentina, he pretends to be a priest and uses a king crab as a guide to find buried treasure.

      The tale of King Crab ends up being so much more than the sum of its parts. The filmmakers take narrative risks and remain unafraid to embrave unconventionality. They also do a great job when it comes to exposition. For a story like this, it takes good storytelling skills to avoid making the audience be too confused. There are also some pleasant surprises and a few thrills along the way, especially once Luciano gets exiled to the mountains of Argentina. At that point, the film veers into the genre of Western, more or less, but yet, again, it's far from a Hollywood film; perhaps it's closest to The Green Knight in terms of how dark and imaginative it becomes.

      The landscape in The Tale of King Crab often turns into a character in itself. With picturesque cinematography, the visuals are poetic.  They're both part of the film's substance and style. Who needs expensive CGI when nature itself can look so stunning and majestic? Poetry is, after all, a form of protest for or against something. What is The Tale of King Crab for or against? That's left up to the audience to decide, but it could be a number of things, i.e. a protest against greed and selfishness. At no point does the film become preachy, though, or even clunky. The performances are by newcomers. Even the lead, Gabriele Silli, is a newcomer, but you wouldn't think that when you see him acting because he's so natural. It's refreshing to see previously unknown actors in these roles because that sense of anonymity makes the film all the more engrossing.  At a running time of only 1 hour and 46 minutes, The Tale of King Crab is a spellbinding, bold and poetic journey well worth taking.

      Casey (Anna Cobb), a teenager, spends most of her time alone in her room playing games on her computer. One of those games is a role-playing horror game called World's Fair Challenge which includes an initiation. She documents the changes that she experiences after the initiation and watches the clips that other players recorded. Meanwhile, an older man hidden behind an avatar, known only as JLB (Michael J. Rogers), communicates with her and claims to be an expert at the game.

      To call We're All Going to the World's Fair a suspense thriller or a horror film wouldn't be fair because it's much more along the lines of a psychological horror, and there's no edge-of-your-seat suspense. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun builds the suspense very gradually with most of it coming from the mystery behind the game and JLB's true intentions. She plays around with what audiences are conditioned to, especially after seeing Catfish, Unfriended and other "found footage" movies, but then she subverts those expectations while blurring the line between reality and fantasy. Should the audience trust JLB? Should Casey trust him? He's old enough to be her father, so it's hard not to see him as a predator, but, again, that's something that's in the mind and projection of the audience based on their own experiences in life and watching other films. There's very little exposition about the game, so you learn about it in bits and pieces. Casey's family life also doesn't have much exposition except that she lives with her father who's not even shown on screen. She briefly interacts with him when he tells her that she's making too much noise. What happens to some of the players in the game doesn't look real, but Casey's emotions are very real and so are her reactions. She's at a vulnerable age where she's still growing up and making sense of the world around her. Perhaps the game and the film itself is like a metaphor for life while also serving as a cautionary tale about loneliness, addiction to technology, and technology's affect on mental health. Schoenbrun leaves those messages up for the audience to determine, so the film doesn't get preachy, but it does become quite moving with a final shot that opens the door for interpretation. The audience, after all, becomes like a character within the film, watching Casey and JLB like a voyeur.

      Anna Cobb gives a breakthrough performance as Casey. She's just as engrossing as Thora Birch is in Ghost World as Enid, who's cut from the same cloth as Casey. Both are lonely, alienated human beings lost in a shallow, dehumanizing world while struggling to figure out how to process their emotions and how to express themselves. JLB also seems like someone going through his own emotional battles. Michael J. Rogers gives a convincingly moving performance, especially during the last scene. Fortunately, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun doesn't resort to shaky cam as a means to generate tension or to invigorate the film; the tension and conflicts come from the characters, the screenplay and the audience's imagination/projections, not from anywhere else. That said, some of the cinematography adds to the film's eerie and foreboding atmosphere. At a running time of 1 hour and 26 minutes, We're All Going to the World's Fair is a timely, unpredictable and poignant hybrid of psychological horror and coming-of-age film.