There's misdirection, and then there are The Sweet East's opening scenes: grainy, intimate, near-vérité home footage of a group of South Carolinian high schoolers running amok on a trip to Washington DC.
A big bad world awaits (emphasis on bad) of Pizzagate conspiracists, white supremacists, Antifa-esque "artivists", asinine New York filmmakers and militant Muslims with a love of trance music in this twisted, provocatively off-colour road movie.
But first, blank-faced teen Lillian (Talia Ryder, of Never Rarely Sometimes Always) is bored and desperate to stand out. While everyone else on the trip wears matching yellow T-shirts, she's in oversized Aerosmith merch and barely glances up from her phone when people talk to her, let alone to take in landmarks. At a karaoke-pizza bar, her disdain reaches a peak: She hides in the bathroom to vape before singing a twee song about a cat, while staring at the audience through the mirror.
This familiar indie flick, the gentle coming-of-age about the misanthropic teenager, is cut short as an armed conspiracist raids the pizza place, demanding to see the basement where elites abuse children.
Lillian escapes quickly with help from Caleb (Earl Cave), a trust-fund revolutionary in a studded jacket who leads her through the secret basement, a labyrinth of dark halls littered with tricycles, dolls and other kids' toys. "Huh, it seems so much bigger than when I was a kid," he says with absent-minded curiosity, rather than a voice weighed down by trauma. And The Sweet East's "odd-yssey" has begun.
The film is written by critic Nick Pinkerton and marks the directorial debut of Sean Price Williams, a celebrated cinematographer who has helped shape the look of American independent film since the mid-00s, working with the Safdie brothers, Alex Ross Perry and more left-of-field filmmakers.
The Sweet East could be considered the indie counterpoint to Alex Garland's recent blockbuster Civil War — also a road movie through a United States torn apart (albeit far more literally). It's a dream-like, occasionally magical carnival ride through the country's conspiratorial right and left, as Lillian follows whoever expresses interest in her.
Much like Garland's controversial film, Williams's debut defies immediate political interpretation. Like its protagonist, The Sweet East is wryly mocking but attracted to the figures Lillian meets, each sinister and deranged in their own way.
The film could be seen as sympathetic to some of the repulsive views it portrays — particularly those of Lawrence (Simon Rex; Red Rocket), a clean-cut, charming American romantics professor she encounters at a white supremacist meet-up. He hides his beliefs of white "racial consciousness" at work, noting it'd be a different story if he was attending transgender communist meet-ups.
Lawrence uses much more offensive language to make his point, of course, as do many characters. Lillian often drops a slur for intellectually disabled people to describe anything she doesn't like — a quirk beholden to New York's Dimes Square, the micro-neighbourhood where Williams runs in a loosely defined, much-analysed grouping of contrarian artists and creatives.
The Sweet East is eager to provoke. Lawrence's racism hides its inherent violence in his intellectual airs and timid presence, best represented by the twee quilt cover in his spare room, adorned with cottagecore baby blue swastikas. As Lillian moves in with him, claiming she's escaping an abusive ex, he keeps his distance and dresses her in coquette dresses and bows while he pontificates endlessly about Edgar Allan Poe and America's "degraded culture", which includes reality TV and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Despite his reprehensible views, he is perhaps Lillian's sweetest encounter, with Rex's charisma rendering Lawrence's loneliness as something to be pitied.
It's an intentionally messy film, both ideologically and visually. Williams's trademark graininess is combined, in scenes of chaos, with juddering unsteady shots, out of focus as if narrative and meaning are struggling to keep up with Lillian's through-the-looking-glass adventure.
Settings, like Caleb's commune, are filled with an overwhelming amount of detail — artworks, fascinating mohawked figures — that Williams's camera barely captures, suggesting we're only scratching the surface. That's not to suggest it's visually ugly: The Sweet East is bright and rich, shot on 16mm film and boldly mixing film references from the 1910s and 70s, despite Lillian's distinctly 2024 encounters.
The soundtrack recalls the foreboding dark, despondent synths of porn composer Patrick Cowley or Greek composer Vangelis. Meanwhile, the film is split up by interstitials echoing those seen in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the influential 1915 silent film that portrays the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes of America's nationhood.
The Sweet East appears to be creating its own patchwork quilt of modern America — one that is quietly empathetic for the economic and cultural circumstances that lead people to bizarre, hateful lives.
Of the film's many sections, its midway point is the most electric, where Lillian meets two frenetic filmmakers on the streets of New York, played with great relish by Ayo Edebiri (The Bear; Bottoms) and Zola screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris.
The two cast her in their Ivory Merchant-inspired period drama, opposite a heart-throb of the moment (Jacob Elordi, in a small but memorable role). Here, Lillian thrives, becoming an overnight "it girl", quickly adapting to a world of tabloid attention, free designer clothing and acid-tongued flirtations.
These are some of The Sweet East's funniest scenes, a pastiche of drug-fuelled pretension that points out art isn't as revolutionary or important as those creating it believe. By effectively undercutting their own life's work, Pinkerton and Williams establish that The Sweet East isn't above the America it mocks, but merely another attempt to make sense of chaos.
At the film's end, text pops up offering the final message: "Everything will happen." The Sweet East offers no thesis on what everything means but, when put like that, how could it?
Instead, this movie is exhilaratingly bizarre and daring, avoiding moral messaging to instead try to capture our increasingly incomprehensible world.
The Sweet East is in cinemas now.