The Sweet East is both the directorial debut of indie cinematographer turned director Sean Price Williams and the first-time screenwriting effort of prolific film critic Nick Pinkerton. Although, considering how expertly directed, written, and performed it is, you wouldn’t really know it.
The film centres on Lillian (Talia Ryder), a quietly disaffected teen from South Carolina on a high school trip to Washington, D.C. The company of teens has more interest in each other and goofing off than in their nation’s capital. The initial feeling is like you’ve stumbled on a cheap teen sex comedy on some old VHS tape in a bargain bin, than the film that is to come.
In the basement bathroom of a pizza parlour in the reflected gaze of Lillian, she serenades us through Paul Grimstad’s excellent fairy-tale score of ‘Evening Mirror’ (performed by Ryder herself). The tone shifts like a 45-record pressed by a thumb with slowly increasing pressure, distorting what was into something surreal and unfamiliar.
It is here that the restaurant is shot up by a gun-toting Q-Anon conspiracy theorist demanding to see the paedophile ring in the basement. During the attack, Lillian is led to safety by anarchist activist Caleb (Earl Cave) via a very real labyrinth of underground tunnels strewn with the remnants of children’s toys as Caleb remarks, “It seemed so much bigger when I was a kid”. Surfacing back onto the streets of Washington, D.C., it isn’t immediately clear that we aren’t in Kansas anymore, but Alice has indeed gone down the rabbit hole and arrived in Wonderland.
What follows is an obscure, dreamy, acid-dripped picaresque road trip through the Eastern United States as Lillian pinballs through the sub-cultures and exaggerated caricatures of the modern American landscape. She rubs shoulders with directionally challenged Antifa anarchists, EDM-loving Islamic terrorists in the Vermont wilderness, a Nazi sympathising college professor, and blabbering Hollywood directors.
Blending surrealist imagery effortlessly carried by William’s deft touch, stellar performances from a stacked cast including lead Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, Australia’s own Jacob Elordi, Golden Globe winner Ayo Edebiri, and a bonkers story from the pen of Nick Pinkerton. It’s satire without preaching, outlandish but not nonsensical, and importantly, effortlessly entertaining.
Talia Ryder delivers an incredibly nuanced performance as Lillian, brimming with a unique brand of restrained nihilism, resembling Gen-Z’s female answer to Holden Caulfield. Ryder plays Lillian to perfection with fascinating self-aware femininity, as her introverted confidence and intelligence make her soft manipulation of male counterparts a joy to watch. She repeatedly transforms herself into a doe-eyed damsel in distress and blankly nods along as other characters endlessly monologue and project their collection of personal, political, and philosophical dissertations of the world at her.
Simon Rex as Lawrence commits in a standout supporting role as a part-time professor and full-time racist. His hilarious and enjoyable characterisation should be an oxymoron considering the subject of his character, but it completely works. Additional performances by Ayo Edebiri and James O. Harris as a metaphorical two-headed Hollywood monster deliver one of the most enjoyable scenes of the film, cackling back and forth in a manner best described by co-star Jacob Elordi in his character Ian’s heavy English accent, “You two are a complete pair of cosmopolitan snobs, you know that yeah?”.
Visually, The Sweet East is a delightfully understated lo-fi feast for the eyes. Director Sean Price Williams has established himself as an elite cinematographer within the world of independent, microbudget filmmaking, previously lending his talents to fellow indie titans the Safdie brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems) and Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Queen of Earth). What Williams has presented is a visually gorgeous film, meeting Pinkerton’s script in the middle to maintain a sharp, snivelling satire. It becomes more than just the sum of what could have easily felt like several, admittedly hilarious, Saturday Night Live sketches, forming a series of vignettes stapled together with steri-strips and duct tape.
Where this film could be an eye-rolling lecture of buzzwords, preaching, and punchlines designed to land squarely on the nose, and by no means is this film subtle, it mostly relishes in absurdity. It stands back and lets the collection of multifaceted characters bore, delight, humour, disgust, and annoy while continuously respecting the audience’s intelligence. The tapestry of an exaggerated, culturally extremist culture in modern America plays out.
To define The Sweet East through its plot would miss its context, and observing it purely for allegory would dismiss how it feels to witness. With characters appearing out of time in their mismatched outfits of decades past, appearing as though the cast has gotten lost on the set of different movies in a Los Angeles film studio backlot and wandered into the path of Williams’ lens. It does beg the question: is this the United States as it is now, or as it has always been?
The Sweet East is, at its heart, a bat-shit crazy roller-coaster ride that’s part American Alice in Wonderland and part acid trip odyssey. Described as a road trip film, it most closely resembles the Odyssey-like journey into a fractured trance of fairy-tale Americana, finished with a heavy varnish of stylish 70s film grain. It’s a film probing with questions about the corruption of modern American sub-cultures and the disconnected, extremist, eccentric archetypes that make them up. It’s a tongue-in-cheek validation of Zoomer-era nihilism, where the search for belonging means you might find a world not worth belonging to, full of creeps, crazies, crooks, cons, and charlatans.
It might be The Sweet East, but is it all going south?
Fun Fact
Premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
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