I’m not really sure how to feel about The Sweet East. There’s a neat little Through the Looking Glass theme that’s threaded throughout that I really enjoy (even when it gets the occasional wire-crossed with Adventures in Wonderland, like most Alice-homaging media does), Talia Ryder gives a magnetic performance amongst a half dozen fully realized supporting roles, and it even manages to get a little surreal on occasion despite being shot with documentary-evoking post-production that effectively contributes to its sense of realism. But I’m not sure if I liked it, or if it was good. This is one that’s best discussed with a plot summary, so if you don’t want to get spoiled, skip ahead to the paragraph that begins “What I straightforwardly love . . .”

Lillian (Ryder) is on a high school field trip to Washington D.C. While out with the group, which includes a guy that she hooked up with and his girlfriend, she is in the bathroom when the very place she is in is attacked by a gun-wielding QAnon lunatic who’s pulling his own Pizzagate. A platinum-haired punk with greatly gauged ears (Earl Cave, bad seed of Nick Cave) pulls her back into the bathroom and, in attempting to get out through the ceiling, discovers that the bathroom’s mirror conceals a secret passage through which they escape through a series of tunnels, avoiding the occasional teddy bear and tricycle. She goes with the punk, named Caleb, and his friends back to their communal crust house, where he eventually shows her his dick under the pretense of showing off his piercings (of which there are too, too many, and some of which seem anatomically impossible). She smokes a bowl with a woman named Annabel who tells her about how she recently left a man because he hit her, then falls asleep. The next morning, she joins a group of a dozen or so of the punks on an expedition to a park in Trenton, where they intend to get into a physical altercation with right-wingers they have been told will be there. The place turns out to be more nature preserve than picnic ground, and the punks run their mouths so much amongst themselves that they pass by the group that they’re looking for without noticing, while Lillian (who stopped to pee) hears them nearby as soon as the punks are out of earshot. 

She wanders into what turns out to be a neo-Nazi cookout, where she immediately attracts the attention of the awkward Lawrence (Simon Rex), who makes his way over to her and introduces himself. Thinking quickly, she gives the name Annabel, and Lawrence, who turns out to be a Poe scholar, just about creams himself; she even takes Annabel’s story about fleeing an abuser, and Lawrence immediately buys her some clothes and food and gives her a place to stay in his family home, which he now occupies alone. Lawrence is a character that puzzles me, because it’s him that I’m least sure what to think of. He displays plenty of overt bigotries above and beyond his closeted Nazism, including wiping a glass of water delivered to him by a Black waitress with a napkin before touching it and using the slurs t****y and f****t conversationally and with his whole chest. He’s handsome because Simon Rex is handsome, and he’s erudite and doesn’t talk down to Lillian/Annabel, but his singular obsession with Poe and what one presumes is at least a decade of no social interaction other than delivering lectures means that he’s a one-track bore on top of being a Nazi piece of shit. Some of this is played for comedy, and some of it lands. When giving her the initial tour, he tells her that she won’t want for reading material as he gestures at shelves full of books like she’s the Belle to his Beast, but when we see any of these shelves up close, they’re full of material of the obsessive war history variety, and she ends up reading a book about the history of trains, if I recall correctly. Later, he shows Lillian the semi-biographical short Edgar Allen Poe from 1909, directed by (yes, that) D.W. Griffiths, and overexplains the way that the film abbreviates and combines various parts of Poe’s life as if this seven-minute short is his Zapruder or Godfather, which is a funny bit. Although Lillian attempts to seduce him are unsuccessful, she does convince him to let her go along with him on a trip to New York, a trip that involves him delivering a duffel bag provided by a skinhead to a rendezvous there. When left alone in their hotel, after convincing Lawrence to move them into a single hotel room so that she could have access to the duffle, finds that it’s filled with cash and absconds. 

Within minutes, Lillian is stopped on the street by two filmmakers, producer Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris) and director Molly (Ayo Edebiri), who immediately enlist her to read for a part in Molly’s film. The two of them talk more at her than to her about what the film is about than what it is, in a hyperactive sugar rush of academia/filmcrit brainworm buzzwords that, unfortunately I understood more of than I would care to admit, which is going to be really embarrassing if there turns out to have been no authorial intent involved. After a brief audition, she meets her onscreen love interest in international heartthrob Ian Reynolds (international heartthrob Jacob Elordi), and the two end up being photographed together by the tabloids. Unfortunately, this ultimately leads to the aforementioned skinhead tracking her down to the shooting location in a rural location, and when Ian’s fooling about with a prop pistol causes a shootout to occur, Lillian is rescued by Mohammad (Rish Shah), a crewmember on the film. He manages to whisk her away to a farmstead across the border in Vermont, where he hides her away in an attic room of a barn and warns her not to let her presence become known, as he has to hide her not just from the neo-Nazis but also his brother Ahmad (Mazin Akar), who is leading some kind of Islamic community, one that includes physical training, assault rifles, and—for all intents and purposes—sweatin’ to the oldies, as Lillian observes from her single window. 

Mohammad continues to keep her locked away by telling her that the killers from what has been dubbed the “Mohawk Valley Massacre” are still loose, but when she manages to get out one day when everyone is away in town, she finds a newspaper indicating that they have been in custody for some time. When the group of men living on the compound return, she manages to convince a charmed Ahmad that she is a local girl who got lost looking for her missing dog, and escapes, only to fall asleep in a snowstorm and be rescued by another long-winded man, this time a priest (Gibby Haynes) who tells her that the police are coming to take her home and then starts to lecture her about the Chapel of the Milk Grotto before she slips back into unconsciousness. She wakes up back home; all of the girls that were in her senior class are pregnant, and people have adjusted to her return, but then her entire family is shocked when the television shows that an apparent terrorist bombing has occurred at the football stadium that was hosting the game they were watching. Who did it isn’t important—the crust conclave, the Trenton neo-Nazis, Ahmad’s group, or even someone completely unrelated—at this point, Lillian has seen a great deal of the east, and the only unifying factor in all of the groups that she has met is that they are all frustrated with the status quo, and ready to do violence. She walks away from the family as they gather to watch in horror, passing in front of a flag with forty-eight stars as we head into the credits. 

What I straightforwardly love about this one is the fairy tale narrative of it. Caleb the white haired punk with the noteworthily droopy ears is our White Rabbit, leading Alice behind the looking glass (even though he is a Wonderland character, you rarely get Alice without him regardless of which work is being adapted); Molly and Matt are the film’s equivalents of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, whose language clearly shares the same words as Lillian/Alice’s but are nonetheless fitted together in ways that she is unable to follow. Some of the other elements are less obvious, as when Lillian is taken for a walk by Mohammad while the others are away and he impresses her by naming every tree that they pass, in an inversion of the scene in Looking Glass in which Alice crosses the “wood where things have no names.” One of the most subtle ones relates to rivers and streams, which in Looking Glass portray the boundaries between the rows of a chessboard in keeping with that book’s motif, and Lillian’s crossing of several rivers and other boundaries on her journey. First, we see the Potomac when she is in DC, and when Lawrence first tells her about his home, he says that it’s “right on the Delaware,” and we see the two of them boating there together. When she’s on location for the shooting of As It Churns, she’s seen sitting on a rocking chair on a dock beside a river, smoking. Later, the crossing of the state border into Vermont is important enough that this film’s segment, as displayed on the interstitial title card, is entitled “First Time in Vermont?” As a Looking Glass Easter Egg hunt, it’s a fair bit of fun. 

Lillian’s actions throughout the film are fun. In each new encounter, she uses something from the previous vignette to her advantage. First, it’s stealing Annabel’s name and backstory when she encounters Lawrence. Later, she cherry-picks an observation from one of Lawrence’s lectures about how Europe perceives America as a young nation that will eventually “evolve” into their “decadent socialism” when it matures, which she turns on the pompous Ian Reynolds when he’s giving the filmmaking group a hard time while out one night. From Molly, she learns that there’s a certain way that she purses her lips when she’s acting that reads as completely genuine, and she uses this exact face on Ahmad in order to come off as naive and dim in order to escape the compound. I’m less enthralled with Lillian as a character. This film has the misfortune of being released after the sustained success of Poor Things, a film with which it shares themes and narrative beats, which is to The Sweet East’s detriment in any comparison. Both feature a naive protagonist who goes on an odyssey of being guided by different people, mostly men, who desire her carnally, and whom she must constantly and continuously evaluate and negotiate with as they attempt to teach her something or institutionalize her into accepting their proffered marriages. 

Talia Ryder is more than up to the challenge, and she’s stunning here, but I don’t love that Lillian is so fond of the r-slur, which is a big hindrance. I don’t expect my protagonists to be perfect, but it sends mixed messages when placed alongside Lawrence’s own bigoted language, which I can only assume is there to remind us that no matter how eloquent he is, he’s an unrepentant racist whom we are supposed to disdain. (In fact, Lillian also uses the f-slur at one point, which I had almost forgotten about.) I’m also not enamored of the “both sidesing” of the various groups we see. The crust punks, who I might remind you we last see setting out to do the good work of bashing in some Nazi skulls, are presented as ineffectual, all while also being mocked for being unable to get organized properly and containing individuals, like Caleb, who are posers with rich parents who are raging to rage, not because they’re at all affected by the machine. Molly and Matt are a parody of what middle Americans think of coastal media elites and pretentious film folk, and we can only assume that Mohammad was planning to keep Lillian captive until she was fully Stockholmed (although there’s sufficient evidence to argue that his brother’s camp is actually a gay boot camp thing). Lawrence is a man whose ideas are objectively evil, but he’s treated with the softest gloves by the narrative, and I don’t like that. It’s possible that there’s something I’m missing here, and I could be completely wrong, but I don’t like this. 

Overall, this one is a mixed bag. There’s a lot that’s great going for it cinematically (director Sean Price Williams was D.P. on my beloved Queen of Earth), and there’s something interesting about the interplay between all of these individuals and communities that Lillian interacts with, but I’m just not sure that it nails down all of its theses as surely as it could and should. Worth seeing, but not internalizing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond