The World Is Full Of Secrets is a 2019 drama about a sleepover where teenage girls share stories with each other about things that frightened them.
On a summer evening in 1996, teenaer Clara (Dennise Gregory) is allowed to invite some friends over while her parents leave her alone for the first time. There’s Mel (Violet Piper), Suzie (Ayla Guttman), and Emily (Alexa Shae Niziak), all over to spend the night, and it’s not long after popping corn and such they settle into a conversation that challenges each other to tell the most terrifying stories they can think of. One by one, the girls take their turns, speaking of tales of disturbing violence and abuse and now, decades later, an older Clara (voiced by Peggy Steffans) recalls for us how a darkness visited upon them and changed them all.
From writer and director Graham Swon, The World is Full of Secrets is an unusual horror anthology of sorts, made with barely any budget, framed and presented in a minimalist fashion in hazy light and moody, atmospheric chapters that feature the girls offering increasingly odd recountings of curiously ambiguous yet soon connected stories. These aren’t the type of bump in the night tales of monsters on the prowl or summoned demons on the loose you might expect, instead lengthy wordy accounts that subvert these trope-ish slumber party fare that detail such things as the mistreatment of Christian woman by Romans to the harrows of witches to the ease of how easily one might slip into the abyss of criminal madness.
Don’t think that each of these segments is opportunity for flashback or re-enactment, for this is not that kind of movie. Rather, most are told directly to the camera with the frame locked on a girl’s face as she speaks, two of them running for more than twenty minutes at a time as we listen. There are moments between these bits that stage some creepiness (and hints of a possible truth), but mostly it’s just a face starting at us as each talk. It’s a risky move, especially in a medium that demands movement. Either way, these stories of darkness escalate until the girls end up outside and step up their commitment to their challenge where an offering is made under a blanket of darkness. Then finally to only two girls share and a last entry.
Partaking in this experiment is a test on the audience, no doubt, Swon pushing the limits of patience about as far as can be made so, but there is an undeniable hook in listening to these haunting stories as they build to something menacing. Swon collapses the movie inside a box, where the screen ratio itself is a bold square and his subjects held in tight, constricting borders. An early moment looks down on a mother and daughter, only their legs and hands visible while sitting on the edge of a bed, what we see meant to deliver more than the words they say. It’s challenging and we are forced throughout to pay attention, the film nearly devoid of a score and often still, purposefully clear of the expectations the genre suggests. It is in fact, a kind of confessional to the preface of something terrible that goes unseen and for that it is sort of maddening, leaving the audience to glean what it can from the words left resting in our ears. That alone makes this unique. Recommended for horror fans who crave their dark art in the peripheral.