Critics reviews

[T]his is still not a film that would pedantically lay out the gradations of its characters’ morality, nor would it make make grandiose political harrumphs, not even “fuck it all.” The Sweet East treats America as a freak show where you can stop, move on, join it, love it, or hate it, but you can never go home.

“The Sweet East” is a road trip without a destination, wielding an edge lord sense of humor without a punchline.

There’s a homespun quality to The Sweet East, in no small part obliged by the grainy, glistening 16mm film it was shot on... It’s difficult to collect exactly what Pinkerton and Williams are endeavoring to articulate about the varying, clashing niches of modern political fractures and social issues other than a feeling of frenetic, fuming chaos—a general sense of disorder and disarray. Perhaps that’s the point.

If a level of hopelessness is understandable “in these times,” Price Williams’s film doesn’t make the case for why we the audience should be invested in Lilian’s hopelessness, much less its own. The Sweet East, then, wears its smarminess as a badge of honor, wanting its audience to accept the hell they live in, and that the film is just another reflection, or refraction, of it.

“The Sweet East” sees subtlety as the enemy from the jump. But the script, by film critic Nick Pinkerton, never evolves past its preferred mode of apathetic, irony-poisoned burlesque, which is caught somewhere between archly comic nihilism and petty trolling.

[I]t’s not easy to nail the balance of wit and humour, and writer Nick Pinkerton absolutely succeeds, while also imbuing the film with clever commentary and a good dose of absurdity.

Railing against conventions has the potential to become conventional after a while, and the film eventually suffers from a case of diminishing returns, but there’s more than enough to warrant such lulls.

For a film that fishes belly laughter out of its audience with the ease of funny confidence, “The Sweet East” still proves a watch firmly planted in sober nihilism, a fever dream of sociopolitical commentary that eats from the feast of Fox News and regurgitates a homage to Lindsay Anderson by way of Forrest Gump.

The film is intriguingly anthropological in its take on America as a subject, viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience — there’s a sense of disintegration and incipient violence seeping through everything, which occasionally explodes to entertaining effect, but there’s clearly deep affection there too.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.

The Sweet East proves to be an unapologetically scruffy road movie in which a directionless teenager finds herself on a strange odyssey, each new encounter more surreal than the last. Talia Ryder gives a magnetic performance, providing an anchor for a film that is amusing and electric but mostly uneven.

The Sweet East struggles to move beyond the surface of some of its more interesting ideas, and its portraits feel shallow as a result. Lillian’s sense of the world expands; the viewer’s, less so. The film swerves between mocking and sentimental, a tonal approach that plays as more confusing than clarifying.