Do you remember your childhood sleepovers? The ones where you would stay up with your friends, eat pizza, pierce each other’s ears, and try to prank and scare each other all night? The World is Full of Secrets by US director Graham Swon immerses us into this nostalgic experience, while succeeding as an unconventional horror.
Set in the summer of 1996, five girls have a sleepover and tell increasingly violent scary stories to each other. Though this film lacks in plot, it uses several narrative techniques to keep the audience’s attention. The story in itself is relayed by an older and hardened by trauma Suzie as she narrates her memories of that night. She hints at a horror that will tear apart their friendship, yet their story is not the ones we are told; rather the girls are telling us other stories revolving around brutality on teenage girls. The film itself never visually portrays violence, the imagery is more tender and poetic than it is scary. The horror comes the stories the girls tell, the ominous nondiegetic music that plays thoughout their stories, and the lingering mystery of what will happen to the girls that night.
The act of remembering is shown through the visuals in this film. Swon’s clear affection for cross fades gives the film a dream-like experience, as if we are jumping from one idea to the other within our own consciousness. Nobody can realistically remember every detail from an event in their lives, and this reality is expressed through the editing of the film. This also helps break apart the two single take monologues that run for a whopping seventeen minutes and thirty-four minutes respectively. What the camera chooses to focus on rather what it should be focusing on helps build Swon’s hyper-stylized world that works within the rules of memory and the subconscious. The camera would focus on the girl’s appendages, the microwave, or a staircase rather than the girls themselves. We are always given pieces of the whole rather than the whole, similar to how our memory works.
The film practices the acts of both distancing the audience and immersing them. The monologues performed by Suzie (Ayla Guttman) and Emily (Alexa Shae Niziak) are single takes shot in close ups. We are uncomfortably close to these girls as they tell us their stories, this claustrophobic experience gives the effect of being a part of the sleepover. Yet, we never get visuals that are relevant to these stories. Left to our imagination, the audience is welcome to wander and create these scenarios in our minds. A thirty minute take is challenging to sit through and a feat to endure. It is uncomfortable and awkward, however it adds to the eeriness of the story.
The World is Full of Secrets is not for everyone; the monologues are intimidating and the narrative choice of “tell don’t show” is contradictory to what we know about what film can do. However, the mise-en-scene is dream-like and beautiful, the stories are effectively disturbing, and the experience of sitting through these long takes in a theater is satisfying. If you missed it at PIFF, The World is Full of Secrets is a film worth hunting down.
-Written by Anny Gutierrez
PSU School of Film @ PIFF 