The Sweet East 18

The Sweet East is a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the United States undertaken by Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina who gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C. Separated from her schoolmates, she embarks on a fractured fairy tale travelogue into America, where she is granted access to a variety of the strange factions that proliferate the present-day unreality of contemporary life.

The Garden Cinema View:

And now for some cinematic Marmite. The Sweet East is a picaresque jaunt through a blighted contemporary American landscape populated with an expansive cast of grotesques destined to end up as sorry punchlines to their own pitiful hubris. Drifting from cinematography duties on the likes of Funny Pages and Good Time (useful tonal touchstones), Sean Price Williams deploys the same textured 16mm photography that has served other directors so effectively. Beyond his frequent collaborators, the Safdie Brothers, he shares some scuzzy American indie DNA with the likes of Todd Solondz, and broader surrealist literary figures such as Thomas Pynchon. Dancing upon a line of political correctness, this will be eye-rolling for some, and hit a beautiful sweet spot for others.    

Cast:
Talia Ryder, Earl Cave, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Jacob Elordi