The East (2013)

The East arrived in 2013 with the weary confidence of a film that had done its homework. Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling spent two months living with freegans and anarchist collectives before writing the screenplay, and the research shows in every squat and train yard. Marling plays Sarah, an operative for a private intelligence firm who is sent to infiltrate an eco-activist cell called The East. The plot is a spy procedural with a conscience, and the conscience is aimed squarely at multinational corporations. The pharmaceutical industry takes the worst of it. The film's villains do not wear government badges. They wear shareholder value.

The environmental grievance here is not decorative. It is the engine. The group's members have each been physically damaged by corporate negligence: poisoned antibiotics, a petrochemical dump, a CEO forced to bathe in the waterway he ruined. The film treats ecological crime as ordinary business practice, which is a colder and more effective argument than any speech. The anti-capitalist posture is total. Every institution in the frame, from the intelligence firm to the boardroom, exists to protect profit from consequence. That the protagonist is a woman of competence who ends the film quietly working against her former employers adds a measure of agency to the proceedings.

Where the film holds back is in the lecture. Batmanglij and Marling dramatize their arguments instead of announcing them, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum and the running time moving. The cast is diverse, though the script has little interest in race as a subject; the divide it cares about is economic. There is a romance, and it is heterosexual and unremarkable. No character is written around body image or neurodivergence. The result is a thriller that is angry about corporate power and environmental ruin while declining to be a pamphlet about anything else. We have seen many films like this. Fewer of them bother to be suspenseful.