Wild odyssey through disintegrating society
THE SWEET EAST (18) ★★★★★
Dir: Sean Price Williams, 104 mins, starring: Talia Ryder, Jacob Elordi
Review by Christina Newland
Not much can prepare you for the psychedelically strange and violent comic journey that is The Sweet East. A clue to its distinctive flavour is that its director – Sean Price Williams, making his film debut – is the in-demand cinematographer for the likes of the Safdie brothers and Alex Ross Perry. Another is that one of the producers, Sean Baker, is behind the lopsided, scuzzy Americana of Red Rocket and The Florida Project.
The story is a free-floating picaresque: a teenage girl, Lillian (newcomer Talia Ryder), goes on a class trip to Washington, DC and finds herself in the midst of a brutal mass shooting. The chaos sends her running in any possible direction, with a chance to reinvent herself along the way.
She soon runs into Lawrence, played by former porn actor and MTV VJ Simon Rex, who was unexpectedly brilliant in Red Rocket and is again here as a buttonedup, manipulative closet neo-Nazi who wants to look after Lillian in his home. In spite of his Maga pals, he sees himself as educated and urbane; Lillian can’t abide his company for long. She stumbles into a film production and gets herself cast, working alongside rising star Ian (Jacob Elordi), thus becoming both a missing person and a tabloid fixture all at once.
Ryder, with her stoplight-big eyes, is infinitely watchable; you constantly feel the chafing discomfort of Lillian’s vulnerability in a violently masculine adult world. Yet she also proves herself more than capable of playing the game, and using her perceived innocence to her advantage.
The film stylishly and comically uses its characters to each explore a different national hypocrisy or stupidity, from cuckoo Reddit survivalists and alt-right nasties to pornographic obsession. It’s not subtle, but it is effective as Lillian is faced with a ragged circus of horrors.
Several critics have referred to The Sweet East as a perverse Alice in Wonderland story, Wonderland here being the hinterlands of a crumbling, deluded American empire. Williams films Lillian’s dangerous odyssey with a kaleidoscopic variety of filters, lenses and dynamic camera work, giving a rough-around-the-edges feel to this strange allegorical tale.
It may not always hang together into a cogent social or political message, but it does feel like a fascinating series of vignettes about just how far we have fallen.