In a dive bar bathroom, Lillian (Talia Ryder), a South Carolina teenager on a Washington field trip, takes a break from her sloshed, sprightly friends to get lost in her own reflection. Music surges—saturnine bass with a dream pop melody—while the opening credits roll. Lillian begins to lip-sync to her own voice. I’m blissed, I’m kissed, free in the atmosphere, she mouths, exhaling clouds onto the glass and pausing to watch them dissipate. Her face—curious, severe—pulses in and out of clarity: a game of obfuscation and revelation that at once resembles a child playing peek-a-boo and a chillingly adult, existential trial.

The Sweet East is fascinated by the voraciousness of images. This makes it a fitting directorial debut for Sean Price Williams, best known as the cinematographer behind the gritty exuberance of the Safdie brothers’ Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019). When the bar is subject to a botched bust-up mimicking Pizzagate, Lillian escapes with a heavily pierced ‘artivist’ (Earl Cave), abandoning her classmates to join him in a commune-like squat, where he cajoles her into witnessing his nightmarish video projections. This is the first stop in an aimless, runaway trek up the coast, punctuated by a series of sojourns with bizarre captors and collaborators. These include a verbose neo-Nazi academic (Simon Rex), a duo of New York filmmakers (played by Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri with riotous charm and zeal), and a stolid cameraman (Rish Shah) living as part of a cryptic brotherhood in Vermont’s woodlands. With a traceless history and a perpetual gaze of detached bewilderment, Lillian is fetishised by all as a mirage from the past and a vision of the future: delusions that can never be satisfied, spooling instead into violence and farce.

Like Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (where a narcoleptic sex worker is caught between the subconscious urge to sleep and the practical need to cruise) or Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (in which a grieving man traverses the desert with such tirelessness that he might as well be stationary), The Sweet East is a road movie that trades in stillness. While there are few shots of rolling hills or flitting highways, there are plenty of Lillian waiting in cars, bathtubs, and treehouses. Neither embracing nor rejecting the milieus that try to envelop her, she instead cultivates a persona of extreme passivity. This allows the film to evolve into an enticing, Frankenstein-esque tale in which the liquid adaptability of the seemingly ideal American subject comes to wreak havoc on its homeland.

When read as a portrait of the contemporary American political landscape, the approach of the film, penned by long-time film critic Nick Pinkerton, may feel sparse. By treating each of Lillian’s encounters with a comparable ire, the film sometimes feels at risk of collapsing evils and eccentricities into one another. However, The Sweet East—whose team of creators includes puppeteers and animators—never strives for staunch realism. As in Van Sant and Wenders’ additions to the genre, its core achievement is atmospheric. While Williams’ 16mm shooting style is often soft, it also has an abrasive, sandpaper quality to it, just as his pastels are accompanied by rich shadows.

A gorgeous original score by composer Paul Grimstad (Heaven Knows What) couples eerily unbalanced rhythms with ethereal twinkles, making the film feel like the slumped palimpsest of a happy dream. Apathy and hope, disgust and relief are layered, building to an effect that is as discomfiting as it is captivating. In the opening scene, an overconfident lover dangles a used condom in the milky morning light. Later, Lillian wakes up under a quilt she doesn’t yet realise is patchworked with swastikas.

The sense of sweet, sincere reflectiveness that drives the beginning of the film, however, starts to peter out as soon as Lillian escapes her peers, who in their first moments are seen tousling with a digicam on the bus, gleefully recording one another as Williams’ lens converges with theirs. There are heartfelt strands to cling onto: the abundant charisma of performances by Edebiri, O. Harris, and Jacob Elordi (as a British tabloid magnet taking delightfully flailing stabs at a Southern accent), though these relationships are callously discarded before they can truly eventuate. As Lillian’s feelings only become more impenetrable, it ultimately feels as if Williams and Pinkerton are overindulging their characters’ twisted idolatry.

While its emotional gullies are frustrating, the film’s intricately staged absurdities, unforeseeable arcs, and constant, peculiar beauty make them well worth enduring. By eschewing the urge to either ignore or demystify disturbing realities, The Sweet East fashions a perverse, mesmeric fable out of the marsh of America’s myth-making.

The Sweet East screened in February as part of Obsessions: A Static Vision Festival and is teased for a wider Australian release later this year.

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Indigo Bailey is a Tasmanian writer and editor living in Melbourne. In 2023, she received the Island Nonfiction Prize for an essay about rain sound. She has written for Island Magazine, The Guardian, Voiceworks, and Kill Your Darlings, among other publications, but first she was published by Rough Cut.