‘The Sweet East’ Promises to Be a Helluva Weird Time
When The Sweet East premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this past May, our reviewer at The Daily Beast’s Obsessed used one key word to describe it: “wild.”
Starring Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) alongside a surprisingly varied ensemble cast—Simon Rex (Red Rocket), Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, [insert every big movie of the fall here]), and Ayo Edebiri (Bottoms, The Bear) among them—the film takes on American political ideologies in a sharp, sardonic fashion.
It also infuses that satire with such unforgettable images as, as our review reads, “a pierced penis … [with] many, many studs.”
While the penis is MIA in the film’s trailer, which The Daily Beast’s Obsessed exclusively premieres below, there’s plenty of other teases at how no-holds-barred The Sweet East’s portrait of our country really is. Through Ryder’s eyes, we experience the wildest, gnarliest, most ironic depths of the U.S. of A., as she goes on a road trip that looks as fun as it is possibly staph infection-inducing.
Director Sean Price Williams, speaking on behalf of screenwriter Nick Pinkerton, tells Obsessed, “We decided to make this movie in the early days of an important shift towards heightened polarity in America, which has only snowballed since.”
Williams, who is best known for his cinematography on films by Alex Ross Perry and the Safdie Brothers, is making his directorial debut here. The Perry and Safdies influence is all over Sweet East. “We are [all] very proud of so much American history and culture, but the very proclamation of American patriotism in the twenty-first century seems to ruffle feathers in most circles we spin within. I think this simple fact inspired us.”
The Sweet East may indeed be an American movie, but certainly not the kind you’d show in any American history class. That said, what shows most of all is how much fun the cast appears to be having amidst the misadventures. “It was so essential to me that everyone on set felt like they were having the best time they have ever had working,” Price Williams says.
The Sweet East hits theaters Dec. 1.
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