Film Review - The Sweet East
Sean Price Williams’ directorial debut The Sweet East is an odd film, in many senses. While it roughly follows the outline of a road movie or journey film, it’s also highly experimental, briefly breaking its form to delve into moments of fantastical surrealism, sleazy gore, and absurd animation. Shot primarily on grainy 16mm stock, Williams’ talents as a cinematographer (having filmed for The Safdie Bros, among others) seem keenly attuned to Nick Pinkerton’s bizarre script, grounding the trip with naturalistic visuals.
Beginning with Lillian (Talia Ryder) embarking on a class trip to Washington DC, before a Pizzagate-like violent outburst from a young man (or maybe not so young, considering it's a cameo from eternal teenager Andy Mionakis) interrupts her night, sending her down an almost literal rabbithole. What initially begins as a somewhat cagey teen sex comedy soon evolves into a splattered lampooning of American culture, devouring the hyper-political toxic waste of the internet and regurgitating it into a playful, picaresque fever dream that seems less interested in saying any one thing in particular and more interested in vandalising the halls of good taste.
While the first group of anarchist misfits she stays with were proving a bit too grating for my personal tastes (which may have been the point), luckily they're gone before long, and Lillian finds herself under the wing of a particularly eloquent neo-nazi played by Simon Rex. This chapter in her odyssey was the one that really sold me on the film, with Rex delivering an incredibly gaudy performance, bouncing off expectations of his character's archetype while still selling the deeply awful nature of his line of thinking. It feels so wrong to be having that much fun watching (and even feeling empathy for) such a gross dude, but Sweet East’s greatest strengths lie in this ironic detachment, and its handful of delightfully layered characters.
From here Ryder’s protagonist is whisked to a film set (featuring similarly admirable on-screen energy from Jeremy O. Harris and Hollywood’s hardest worker, Ayo Edibiri). There's a great moment for Jacob Elordi fans when Lillian google searches his character, and then perhaps an even greater moment for Elordi haters in the segment's climax that’s up there with Pete Davidson in The Suicide Squad and Channing Tatum in The Hateful Eight as far as an unceremonious coup de grâce. Finally we end up at a gay (?) Islamist camp, and it's here that the energy fizzles out again - as much fun as the visual gag of a mixtape entitled “Bismillah Beats” is - before the film ends with something of a shrug. It's not enough to sour my thoughts on the film as a whole, but it does feel a little like putting the cart before the horse in terms of the ideas presented versus what the emotional outcome is.
That being said, The Sweet East is extremely admirable for its sheer gumption to go for broke, regardless of whether that ends in success or a bit of a whiff. It's an inconsistent high, but that only makes it more interesting, and the confidence in its approach is a rare thing to come by, especially in a debut feature. By being unafraid to challenge the audience or even itself, it feels as freeform as the pilgrimage its main character is blown away on. Natalia Ryder understands the assignment and grounds the emotional voyage with a sense of cool aloofness, taking away elements of each pitstop to help carry over to the next, even as its commentary on American narcissism begins to feel a little like a shield.
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The Sweet East screened as part of Static Vision’s 2024 Festival, Obsessions. Follow Static Vision on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd.