'The East' Loses Direction

Normal people can put up with letting rich people escape justice. But if you never bring them to justice in the first place, that can set people on edge, or to extremes. When that happens, you might get a group like The East, an anarchist collective that targets corporations that they believe are damaging the environment and its people.

When the group successfully targets those it deems guilty, it starts attracting attention. Soon Sarah (Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the screenplay with director Zal Batmanglij) is tapped by her private security firm to infiltrate the group. Of course, Sarah eagerly accepts and is quickly (maybe too quickly) able to insinuate herself into The East.

It's a given that Sarah soon becomes attached and starts to sympathize with the group's members, especially their charismatic leader Benji (Alexander Skarsgård). After all, apparently a few of them have personally suffered from the corporations they're targeting. Well, at least a few of them have. “The East” is a bit lax on the character development of some of its members, and really only goes into the tragic bits of the people they do explore. (The few that do get backstories are depicted as pretty privileged themselves before circumstances led them to rage against the machine, as it were.)

And of course, Sarah is soon caught in a sort of moral and emotional quandary: if the people The East targets really are harming others and not being held accountable, is Sarah mistaken for trying to stop them? After all, there is a sort of poetic justice when the group slips a pharmaceutical company's own drug into the members of said company's champagne at a party. But how far is too far? And what about the inevitable collateral damage?

It's a great improvement from the last time star Brit Marling and director Zal Batmanglij collaborated on “The Sound Of My Voice,” a movie that explored another insular world with its own bizarre rituals designed to cement the bonds between its members. But unlike that film, no one was laughing here.

But another thing “The East” shares with “Sound Of My Voice” is the refusal to really take a position. Presenting the facts through the eyes of your characters is one thing, but refusing to present all of them is another thing entirely. Both movies stumble in their second act, but it's a credit to how much both Marling and Batmanglij have grown as filmmakers that “The East” doesn't stumble nearly as much. Even if they don't fully explore all the issues, it's still good food for thought.

Grade: B-