The Big Picture

The Sweet East
is a well-shot though ultimately empty absurdist look at Eastern America.
The film follows Lillian as she goes from a field trip to a more wandering and scattered series of encounters.
Talia Ryder delivers a captivating performance, but the film lacks depth and the earned transgressiveness it is reaching for.

“It’s really pretty,” says Talia Ryder’s Lillian in awe while hitching a ride into the city in an early scene of The Sweet East. The revealing response that she gets, “Not if you know what’s in it,” is about as good a summary of the film’s general ethos as one could hope for.

Written by first-time writer Nick Pinkerton and directed by Sean Price Williams, who previously was the cinematographer on the spectacular Safdie brothers’ film Good Time, it is a film that is more interesting to look at than it is to engage with. Williams, who is again credited as cinematographer, has a great eye when it comes to finding the simultaneously grimy yet graceful textures of the settings he takes us into. The trouble is, the longer you look at what can be potent visuals, the more you realize how empty the film itself is. Even when some of the humor starts to hit as it lazes along, you can’t escape that it isn’t just the characters who are self-indulgent. The Sweet East ends up saying quite a bit, though little leaves any real impression.

What Is ‘The Sweet East’ About?

The film begins with Lillian as she’s on a trip to Washington D.C. with the rest of her high school class. She has just slept with the cute boy in her class who also turns out to be a generally annoying jerk, even in the few minutes we get to know him. When out one night at a dingy dive bar, Lillian sings a song in the bathroom that is then interrupted by a shooter who bursts in shouting about the horrific abuses that are supposedly taking place in the basement. The reference to a real incident where someone who bought into the far-right Pizzagate conspiracy and shot up a local restaurant is then used as a jumping-off point for Lillian to go on a journey into the wider world of the Eastern part of the United States.

She’ll encounter a vaguely leftist group that plays like they’re an extended riff on something like How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which was itself already more incisive and self-aware than this is, just as she does Simon Rex’s hateful Lawrence who rambles on and on about everything from Edgar Allan Poe to his insecurities as he takes her on a trip to New York City. However, Red Rocket this is not. Where that film saw Rex authentically embody a manipulative scumbag who could charm his way into various situations just enough to create chaos when he proceeded to take off running, The Sweet East makes him into just another scattered stop on Lillian’s journey. One is tempted to call it a waste, but that itself may be overstating it.

‘The Sweet East’ Is Only Sporadically Funny
Image via Cannes Film Festival

The joke of it all, perhaps best embodied in the brief appearances by Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris as two filmmakers she encounters on the street, is we are all just full of ourselves. Every bubble that she breaks into inevitably bursts before she just stumbles into the next one. The duo just rambling on and on with nonsense is more fascinating to watch than any of these new places as they capture this with a verve the film is otherwise lacking, setting Lillian up perfectly to deliver the punchlines as she gets swept up in their production. This is where Jacob Elordi also shows up, initially doing a ridiculous and inconsistent accent that the film calls attention to before just letting him run with it. A conversation they have at a bar is all about the “vibe” as Lillian remarks, making clear that the more lackadaisical absurdity is what the film is most interested in. Everyone she encounters is up their ass to the point that it’s a wonder that we’re able to see anything taking place around them past a certain point.

The gag of it all just isn’t as consistently funny as it seems to think it is. When it briefly goes off the rails near the middle, at the point where two storylines collide, it starts to feel more genuinely chaotic and interesting. It’s a shame that nothing else can match this, as it just gets lost in the woods, dragging itself to the close with more of a wink and a shrug than anything truly, meaningfully transgressive. People deserve a more genuinely absurd work of cinema and The Sweet East is not it. For every glimpse there is of what could be a shining light to focus on, there are countless other more oddly mundane moments that smother it all.

Talia Ryder Remains Terrific in ‘The Sweet East’
Image via Cannes Film Festival

If there is a saving grace to the film, it is that Ryder is a riveting performer worth watching in just about anything. While not every work can be Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which will always be one of the most essential American films of the last decade, there is still something to be appreciated in the way she embodies her characters. Even when The Sweet East stalls out in the end, she finds plenty of silliness in the small gestures that make you wish the movie itself was better. It isn’t a disaster by any means, but it doesn’t have the spark to deserve to be hailed as some unexpected cult hit. Had it been able to more consistently channel the energy of Ryder and Edebiri throughout or recapture the lightning in the bottle that is the central sequence in the middle, maybe it could have reached greater heights. Instead, it is merely ordinary rather than as absurd as it could be, ultimately falling into feeling forced rather than as fast on its feet as it needed to be. Even as it paints a pretty picture in a visual sense, you’ll find yourself squinting just to see how disappointingly little The Sweet East amounts to.

The Sweet East REVIEWThe Sweet East has some solid performances, but the absurdity of it all proves empty rather than transgressive. ProsTalia Ryder gives another great performance that finds plenty of earned silliness in the small gestures.The film is well-shot and proves that director Sean Price Williams as a great eye as a cinematographer. ConsThe film ends up saying quite a bit on its journey, but little of it leaves an impression.Save for a middle section where things start to go off the rails, the film is more oddly mundane on the whole.The ending gets lost in the woods, dragging itself to a close with a wink and a shrug.

The Sweet East is now available to stream on VOD in the U.S.

WATCH ON VOD