In the opening of Graham Swon’s debut feature, The World is Full of Secrets (2018), an older woman’s voice invites the viewer into a flashback as she remembers a pivotal night from her youth. In 1996, a group of five girls convened for a sleepover and challenged one another to tell the scariest, most awful story they'd ever heard. The narrator alludes to the night having ended in tragedy and states that the grim events of the evening are well-known while also implicitly promising a terrifying payoff. The gory climax that horror movies and true crime media train one to expect, however, never arrives.
Swon is not interested in depicting a slumber party massacre, but the tales the friends tell throughout the evening—which all seem to center around girls who are brutally punished for one transgression or another—create an uneasiness that lasts throughout the entire film. Like the plague that drives the storytellers in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron to sequester themselves in a secluded villa, violence feels like it’s always just outside the frame, and that the American suburban home is not enough to stop it. As the night grows darker, the mood becomes more ominous, ambiguous as to whether a real threat is imminent or if the quiet delirium that comes from trying to stay awake all night has set in.
The World is Full of Secrets is rather minimalist in terms of its camerawork, with Swon and cinematographer Barton Cortright composing simple yet striking shots that bleed into one another through extended crossfading, a hypnotic technique that captures the atmosphere of the sleepover as a liminal space. In each of the storytelling scenes, the actor orates throughout a single take, primarily looking directly into the camera, as if speaking directly to the audience. The centerpiece is the monologue delivered by Ayla Guttman in which she describes a group of teenage girls who turn on one of their friends and viciously murder her. After talking for more than 20 minutes, Guttman switches out a third-person pronoun, inadvertently implicating herself in the story she’s telling. Whether it was the character or actor who made the error, the result is a moment that pierces the cloak of fiction in a chilling way, reflecting how violence is an ever-present force that looms over the experience of girlhood.
The World Is Full of Secrets screens tonight, October 18, and on October 28, at Spectacle. Director Graham Swon will be in attendance for a Q&A tonight.
