"You spy on us, we'll spy on you." Just one part of an opening monologue by The East's Ellen Page as we see security camera footage of a rich house being filled with oil, a bath overflowing, air ducts dripping with the stuff. This unsettling image is the first sight the audience has with The East, an environmental activist group that goes above and beyond with their 'jams' to meet big business eye for eye. The film sees Brit Marling's professional security expert find her way through the streets and become a spy in The East's head camp, finding out exactly who the members are, and what they plan on doing next, financed by a company more than likely on their radar.

The East's key figure is Alexander Skarsgard's Benji, a man who is mostly under the radar in terms of appearance, presence and actions, but has times when he comes out as a leader that really shows his power. Marling's Sarah doesn't completely get into The East with ease, but Benji sees opportunity there, opportunity that Ellen Page's Izzy doesn't quite agree with, as she plays the on-the-ball if overly-aggressive member of the group, thinking that Sarah's appearance in the group is more than a little coincidental. As such, tempers flare at times, and when Sarah is asked to help pull off one of The East's jams (At which point Ellen Page says "This Is My Jam") Izzy is little riled up that the outsider is already deep inside.

This only gets worse as the jam becomes more effective, and they look out for their next one. With Sarah now unsure why she's still undercover, and her employers haven't shut The East down for good, and becoming more and more involved with not just The East but with Benji, tempers flare, loyalties shift, and everything comes to a head.

To a head, we say, although as one expects from a film co-written by Brit Marling, the climactic elements of the film are at once strong and ambiguous. There's an element of not really knowing how to end, not necessarily going for an uncertainty because the story warrants it but for the sake of it being easier to cut out of a strong scene five minutes before the end rather than really find the suitable ending for the story. It's a thing Marling has done a few times now, and whilst in the case of Another Earth it was a little surprising, and Sound Of My Voice would have been a messy clean-up, The East is a slicker production, made with a bigger budget, with bigger names, and runs 40 minutes longer than Zal Batmanglij's previous film, so not having a full conclusion after 2 hours becomes infuriating.

As stated above, The East is slickly made in comparison to Sound Of My Voice, with a bigger budget they have turned Batmanglij's decent, if Vimeo-friendly images from his previous film into something quite beautiful, interesting, involving. The imagery of the film is careful, it doesn't shove it into your face rather than let a lot of the film happen before you, and subtly hand you some really strong images and well-crafted framework. It is a shame that the script doesn't live up to the camera-work in this case, The East has a few snippets that harken back to Sound Of My Voice's brilliant, intense, insular basement-dweeling community being given tasks to do to establish one's character in action, but that's so little of The East, where the majority lands itself in 'unsure if genius or boring' characters staring at one another or footage or blueprints of their plans of action. Things are always discussed about happening, but rarely happen, and a lot of the film gets bogged down in a rather uneventful story involving Sarah's loss of light undercover, becoming much more involved with The East than she should. It's a story we have seen played out in many variations before and unfortunately The East hasn't got anywhere near enough originality to bring to the story to make it more than just enough to sustain 80 minutes.  A shame it's almost 2 hours, because there's a lot of scenes that don't have momentum, or in fact become painfully tedious as they seem to repeat the stakes or the characters or the politics or the relationships. Thankfully between some overbearing writing on the character front, the attack on corporations isn't handled quite so brutally, with some really strong lines of dialogue in relation to the realities of big business' attitude to humanity and the like.

The East is well performed and well shot, with some very good and memorable scenes, but it plays itself out long before the finale, really has no idea if it wants to be as slick as it looks or as gritty as some scenes are edited to be, and wants to provoke the audience a lot more than tell a story. The provoking kind of works, but it'd be a lot more interesting had there been more for the audience to cling on to on screen for the duration. It comes close to being great a few times, and only then falls short, clutching air rather than solid earth as it tumbles far from these genius scenes into predictability, pseudo-tension that doesn't have much effect, if any, and a climax that's much less than we as an audience deserve at that point.