The Sweet East (2023)

High school senior Lillian (Talia Ryder) semi-accidentally goes on the run when the opportunity arises to while she’s on a class trip to Washington DC. From there, she goes on a long strange trip across the Eastern seaboard of the US, during which she falls in with leftist college activist, becomes  the live-in Lolita of pseudo-intellectual neo Nazi (Simon Rex) who likes to go off about Poe but really doesn’t seem to have made it to Nabokov, turns curiously (or not so curiously, really) great actress in a low budget movie for a bit, survives a massacre that’s somewhat her fault, and falls in with a member of an Islamic cult living in the woods. Among other things.

The first ten minutes or so of veteran indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s first feature as a director go for maximum lo-fi indie grain eyestrain, threatening the sort of misunderstood naturalism I still loathe known as mumblecore. But as soon as Lillian starts on her improbable trip across the Eastern seaboard of the United States by going through the modern version of a rabbit hole, things turn more interesting – and calmer – to look at.

They also turn increasingly surreal, Lillian drifting through an America that has gone off-kilter and ever so slightly grotesque. Like the proper protagonist of any good picaresque, Lillian herself is a bit of a trickster, able to project exactly the qualities the people – mostly men - she falls in with want to see in her, and thus uses this ability as a survival tool. Or, one can’t help but think, as a way to keep the world off her back, so she can drift, and look and just be in the world. Lillian always seems to sit right on the border between user and used, naïve and manipulating here, and the film never makes the mistake to replace this enigmatic quality – perfectly projected via Ryder’s exceptional performance – with something as boring as psychology or trauma porn.

While there’s violence and horror here as well – we are talking about contemporary America after all – The Sweet East never loses its dream-like quality, never playing as a coming-of-age movie in the traditional style, but rather one that portrays the strangeness of a self not fully formed colliding with the strangeness of the world. This quality of dream, of a fairy tale without a moral, is probably what draws me particularly to the movie. Even though I wouldn’t exactly call this a work of fantastic cinema, its feel is much closer to the realm of, for example, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural than US independent cinema of this style typically ventures these days.