February 15, 2025

FILMHOUNDS Magazine

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The Sweet East (Film Review)

Social media can be difficult to navigate at the best of times. For filmmakers, it’s the siren song many find hard to resist. Phil Lord has wiped away some of the Spiderverse goodwill by being fairly unbearable about animation on Twitter/X. Paul Schrader’s Facebook account is a PR’s nightmare. And earlier this year, The Sweet East writer and film critic Nick Pinkerton took to Twitter to take on his local art-house cinema in a bizarre tirade for not premiering his film. To their credit, the Esquire Theatre in Cincinnati killed him with kindness. It was not a good look.

It seems fitting then that The Sweet East is another entry into the ‘modern-day loser cinema’ canon that loosely includes the Safdie’s Good Time and Uncut Gems, as well as Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, Owen Kline’s Funny Pages and Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up. Director Sean Price Williams has been a pivotal figure in American independent film over the last decade, shooting, amongst others, Elisabeth Moss in both Queen of Earth and Her Smell, the aforementioned Good Time and Funny Pages, and even Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones. The Sweet East represents his directorial debut, in which high-school student Lillian (Talia Ryder) breaks away from her class trip to Washington, D.C, and finds herself brushing shoulders with counter-cultural groups across the United States. If the revival and success of the comic book movie marked a veneration of the nerd, then perhaps this brand of cinema is a response. The odious American underbelly captured by nerds who feel more closely tied to countercultural cinema than funko-pops. The Sweet East adds to this burgeoning oeuvre, taking in a cross-section of the people behind the keyboards in America’s so-called culture war.

Appropriately enough, Lillian’s fall down the rabbit hole begins with a mini-pizzagate, which she escapes via a series of tunnels only to eventually stumble upon an alt-right gathering. There she meets self-professed academic Lawrence (Red Rocket’s Simon Rex) who offers her refuge in his home. A thinking man’s Neo-Nazi, Lawrence pitches himself as a cut above the gun-toting MAGA crowd. His home is filled with a library of questionable literature and he waxes lyrical on the poison that is “reality TV, blockbusters, mega-churches and To Kill A Mockingbird.” Part prisoner, part princess–but often Alice (in Wonderland)–Lillian shares some moments of idyllic bliss with Lawrence. Yet these feel grossly engineered by a man who attempts to replicate the cultural authority of the Genteel Tradition–a movement that sought to uphold classic notions of American high culture and Victorian standards shortly after the American Civil War–using his expertise on American Romanticism in the process. At first charming in its naïveté, Lillian’s teenage indifference begins to grate on Lawrence, who begrudgingly takes her to New York City only to see her escape with his red duffel bag full of money.

Upon breaking free, Lillian falls on her feet again, cast by black filmmakers Molly (Ayo Edebiri) and Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris) as an actress in a period film alongside up-and-coming actor Ian Reynolds (Jacob Elordi). The fictional film aims to chronicle modern America’s formation by the religious fanatics who founded it, and is just one in a whole host of references to the country’s ongoing ideological crisis. Trouble starts when Lawrence’s associates pay a visit to the set, looking for Lillian and their lost money. Perhaps The Sweet East is merely a prequel to Alex Garland’s Civil War?

Whilst Lillian daintily treads amongst America’s weeds, the film itself stumbles, becoming so reference-laden as to be almost incomprehensible. Tripped up by its own desire to be ironic is an irony in itself. Pizzagate is true, the Muslims are gay, the alt-right are paedophiles and everything is a joke. It’s the ‘anarchic’ response not just of the chronically online and the anti-woke everyman, but of the common-sense centrists and even the apathetic left.

Ryder though is phenomenal as the enigmatic wanderer who ensnares all she meets. The Never Rarely Sometimes Always actress has the pull of Steph Curry off a pin-down. Now there’s a reference. An unbothered adolescent, terrified of anything approaching sincerity, Ryder seems adept at playing the mirror, reflecting the poisonous and ridiculous views of a polarised country. But when the loudest of those ideas are Lawrence’s faux-intellectual thoughts on minorities, the film’s lack of voice becomes frustrating. On the eve of another potential Trump Presidency, is this the film we want? Maybe it’s what we deserve.

The Sweet East will be released in selected cinemas across the United Kingdom and Ireland from 29 March