Hot off the success of Sound of My Voice Zal Batmanglij and his partner in crime Brit Marling take their focused engaging narrative/shooting style and apply it to The East, a throwback to the classic 70’s style thrillers. The East follows Sarah (Brit Marling), an operative for an elite private intelligence firm whose first assignment is to infiltrate this eco-terrorism cell known as “The East”. Their plan is to attack guilty parties (companies who are responsible for oil spills, selling untested pharmaceuticals, toxic dumping, etc.) and their latest string of “jams” is to give these high and mighty CEO’s a taste of their bad medicine by bringing these crimes to light. Over the course of 6 months Sarah gets close to the elusive and clandestine group and begins to win their favor. Yet all too soon her sense of right and wrong is skewed and she starts to see how wrong she might have been protecting the people The East are fighting against.
Marling, the acting virtuoso that she is, plays, all to convincingly actually, a free-spirited genius level wanderer who is happy with her new job at the 
intelligence firm. This company, a sort of of protective image consultant agency, doesn’t really care about anything but protecting their clients from bad publicity. Ethics and morals need not apply. They aren’t even afterthoughts but Sarah has trouble being as cold as her boss and turning off her emotions. Were this not a role written by and for Brit Marling, Sarah would be flat and uninteresting. If there’s one thing consistent about any of Marling’s performances or the films she’s in is that she’s hypnotic and magnetic. The East is so dense, well-crafted and executed it manages to make her very fine previous films Another Earth and Sound of My Voice look like community theater by comparison. Writer/director Zal Batmanglij (pronounced: bot – mang -lij) has an eye for composition but here it is intensified becoming as sharp as a noir but with a full color palette.
The East is a low level and rather understated spy film and it’s a genre that’s not explored often enough these days. It’s almost like Fight Club re-imagined by Robert Ludlum as this covert espionage thriller is a tour de force on all accounts offering mystery intrigue and simply fascinating characters at every turn. Lots of filmmakers strive to give a film a heart and weight but Marling and Batmaglij give The East a soul and the story grows on you minute by minute. It’s like a comforting and inviting quicksand (yes, we know that’s an contradiction/oxymoron) but it is so deliciously inviting you don’t mind the grittiness and all to easily get swept up in this nail-biting story. Like David Fincher, Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij are the future of film.
As if Batmaglij and Marling needed any help to give their story some heft along comes Harry Gregson-Williams and Halli Cauthrey. This tag team approach to the soundtrack, an overpowering effort if you ever heard one, takes onscreen tension (which is already high) and ratchets it even higher with a Hans Zimmer level of percussion and themes. Batmanglij has a great eye for visuals and scene composition but with The East he’s outdone himself. Working with Scott Free productions (the company started by Ridley and Tony Scott – sadly this film the last one Tony produced before his death) may have lent a hand in the visual composition but this still feels like Zal and Brit’s movie. Something as simply conceived but expertly executed as Marling’s first dinner table scene with The East is so mind-blowing that if you aren’t completely sucked into the movie you should check your pulse to see if you’ve still got one.
Batmanglij and Marling handle not only a larger scale story but more numerous characters and no one seems to be getting the brush off or playing second fiddle to the Brit Marling show. The camera loves Marling and this time she shares the screen with some highly capable actors as she joins, not leads the likes of Alexander Skarsgård, Toby Kebbell, Ellen Page, and the rest of the eclectic cast. It’s a tight-knit group that shows many times how the group is dependent on everyone working as a unit, even so far to show their closeness as a, more or less, family. Again the dinner scene is mind-blowing but on a more intimate level is the bottle scene which shows an emotional core to these unfairly labeled eco-terrorists. Through the lens there’s a real tangible human element that Batmanglij nails time and again. Moreover, his films are so personal you tend to forget these are all fictional characters.
Speaking of the cast, everyone has an important part and like gears in a clock they all perform expertly and in unison. None more so than Ellen Page who, when given the chance in her moderate sized role, owns the film specifically one gut-wrenching scene where she conveys one of the most heart-stopping and tear jerking scenes in the movie. She makes you feel her pain so much so that even though it is all acting it’s so convincing you’d think it was real. It transcends the film and the story and hits at an emotional level you didn’t think was possible. It’s just one of the many unexpected scenes the film has in spades. Batmanglij and Marling exhibit something so free of trite plot devices and archetype characters that it perpetuates and champions its own originality making all other thrillers seem silly and overdone by comparison.
The story unfolds as brilliantly as it does enigmatically and is just what you’d expect from a first-rate thriller. We just don’t see this caliber of story too often, or often enough really. If there’s one gripe to be had it’s the ending, well, part of it. By now, people might expect a shocker twist or ambiguous ending; both After Earth and Sound of My Voice certainly had one. Well it’s not entirely the case here but if anything The East has a non-ending, or a “now what?” ending, likened to something that will be followed up/expanded upon in another story or episode. That might not sit well with people but in many ways it’s the right way to go because that’s more true to life anyhow as well as in keeping with the duo’s previous efforts. No tied up or happy endings here, just the next chapter in this vastly engaging and intricate story. We can only hope to see more of this story because when The East is over you won’t want it to end.
G-S-T RULING:
The East a gripping ride that is just dripping with coolness and has all callbacks that made 70’s thrillers so iconic and engaging (sans the bell bottoms and mustaches). So just short of this review wanting to get into every fascinating element and plot device, which would spoil the whole story, instead it will conclude having attained one of our highest recommendations to date (even if the score below isn’t a perfect 4). See this movie, see this movie, SEE THIS MOVIE!!
One Comment
Gail
The reality is:
1. There is an antibiotic causing the exact symptoms portrayed in the film, they are called Fluoroquinolones.
2. If you listen to the news caster in the movie you will hear the name Fluoroquinolones, and how it was used during the Gulf War to vaccinate our troops against Anthrax – the “Gulf War Syndrome” the soldiers suffer from is actually the adverse reactions to the Fluoroquinolone vaccination used, Cipro.
3. Bayer, along with Johnson & Johnson, and the FDA, are all fully aware of how thousands of people have been stricken by the serious adverse reactions to Fluoroquinolones. The three most common prescribed are Avelox, Cipro, and Levaquin – but even with the profits in the billions from the sale of these medications, not one dime has been spent by any of them to research why is it happening, how to reverse, or repair the damage it has caused to the thousands of patients who trusted that the medication they were taking was safe.
It’s obvious to those who suffer from Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Syndrome that the makers of this film did their research prior to making the film, and were spot on in their portrayal of the symptoms of the adverse effects of this antibiotic. This is a classic “Truth is stranger than Fiction” when it come to Fluoroquinolones. The pharmaceutical companies want the world to believe these reactions are rare, when they are not. It has been estimated that 1 out of 10 people will have some type of reaction to these antibiotics ranging from mild to severe. The pharmaceutical companies are willing to let the “few” suffer for the “greater good.” Most people know and understand the risk of tendon damage and rupture from Fluoroquinolones, because the pharmaceutical companies were forced to place a warning on the antibiotics – FORCED being the operative word here. They are NOT going to acknowledge any other reaction they are not forced to do. The scariest part of the whole movie – what does it tell you when Hollywood “gets it” before the FDA does?
In your review you state, “The group’s first action is premised on the idea that a pharmaceutical has already made billions off a medicine that regularly causes crippling brain damage after just one dose, without being pulled off the market — when there are plenty of more plausible, less hyperbolic plot devices that wouldn’t have taken the film so far from reality.” The reality is: 1. There is an antibiotic causing the exact symptoms portrayed in the film, they are called Fluoroquinolones. 2. If you listen to the news caster in the movie you will hear the name Fluoroquinolones, and how it was used during the Gulf War to vaccinate our troops against Anthrax – the “Gulf War Syndrome” the soldiers suffer from is actually the adverse reactions to the Fluoroquinolone vaccination used, Cipro. 3. The pharmaceutical companies , and the FDA, are all fully aware of how thousands of people have been stricken by the serious adverse reactions to Fluoroquinolones. The three most common prescribed are Avelox, Cipro, and Levaquin – but even with the profits in the billions from the sale of these medications, not one dime has been spent by any of them to research why is it happening, how to reverse, or repair the damage it has caused to the thousands of patients who trusted that the medication they were taking was safe. It’s obvious to those who suffer from Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Syndrome that the makers of this film did their research prior to making the film, and were spot on in their portrayal of the symptoms of the adverse effects of this antibiotic. This is a classic “Truth is stranger than Fiction” when it come to Fluoroquinolones. The pharmaceutical companies want the world to believe these reactions are rare, when they are not. It has been estimated that 1 out of 10 people will have some type of reaction to these antibiotics ranging from mild to severe. The pharmaceutical companies are willing to let the “few” suffer for the “greater good.” Most people know and understand the risk of tendon damage and rupture from Fluoroquinolones, because the pharmaceutical companies were forced to place a warning on the antibiotics – FORCED being the operative word here. They are NOT going to acknowledge any other reaction they are not forced to do. The scariest part of the whole movie – what does it tell you when Hollywood “gets it” before the FDA does?