Indecipherable Secrets

By Cornelia Laakso

In a short preface to the Portland International Film Festival screening of The World is Full of Secrets (2019, U.S.), attending director Graham Swon advised that the film has a “strange rhythm,” and suggested that the audience relax and let it get into their bloodstream. The film, which follows five girls at a sleepover trading stories about murder and brutality, is difficult to relax to, in large part by that strange rhythm. Rather than lending itself to the sense of horror and dread which thematically characterize the girls’ stories, the disjunctive pacing of the film informs an overall lack of cohesion and ultimately detracts from its cumulative impact.

A Q&A session with Swon following the film provided useful insight into an objective that was otherwise obscured by the film’s formal structure. Swon noted that the script was inspired by a 1992 crime—some light internet sleuthing revealed this to be the murder of twelve-year-old Shanda Sharer by four teenage girls—the story of which is described in one of the two lengthy monologues in the film. In an effort to tell the story without presenting it as “torture porn,” Swon described the film’s fictionalized and slightly removed structure as offering access to the story without the same violence. This is conducive with the choice to refrain from showing any gore; here, the sense of violence comes from the imaginary realm which is stirred up when the girls tell stories of murder. Tight framing and a concise aspect ratio privilege the girls’ faces as they embark on their monologues; these scenes emerge as an experience of duration which feel divorced from the rest of the film’s pacing and distract from an otherwise rich source material. I found myself wishing that the monologues would end sooner than they did, not because of the content of the stories but because it became hard to see the forest through the trees.

An area of strength in The World is Full of Secrets is in its performances. Swon noted that the two actors who perform long monologues are experienced in theatre, and that much is evident by the sheer amount of dialogue they effectively deliver. Blemishes are purposefully left in these monologues, and at times other lines of dialogue come across as choppy or lacking fluidity. The director described his intention as wanting to reflect the imperfect and awkward ways in which teenagers speak to each other; this sense of realism, much in the tradition of Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018), is refreshing, but it is also detached from the tight framing, dream-like transposed imagery, long dissolves and crossfades which orient the film outside of straightforward realism. Swon cited an influence in Andy Warhol’s long-take films, such as Face (1966), in which an unbreaking shot follows Edie Sedgwick’s face for an extended amount of time. He described the viewing experience as an evolution; interesting at the beginning, slow and a little boring in the middle, and even more interesting by the end, when seemingly unimportant elements of the shot begin to stand out. Applied to The World is Full of Secrets, this concept falls short; the bigger picture competes with long-shots and ultimately recedes into the lyrical background.