After a run-in with railroad police exposes her original lead as an undercover Fed, Jane becomes convinced that she's hit a dead end. However, while calling back to report to her employers that the mission has been a bust, Jane spots a compass talisman that suggests that one of her travelling companions knows more about The East than he's letting on. On the spur of the moment, Jane gashes her forearm open with a soda can; the ploy works, and soon she's taken to get stitches at The East's compound, a dilapidated mansion in the woods of Pennsylvania.

There Jane meets the core members of the group: intense, zealot-like Izzie (Ellen Page); good-hearted, mascara-wearing Luca (Shiloh Fernandez); team medic Doc (Toby Kebbell); deaf, friendly Eve (Hillary Baack); den mother and expert hacker Tess (Danielle Macdonald); and their charismatic de facto leader, Benji (Alexander Skarsgård). After a member of the team abruptly leaves, new arrival Jane is roped into their latest "jam" — a plot to exact revenge on a pharmaceutical company.

The rest of the film finds Jane shuttling back and forth between The East's mansion and her home in Washington, D.C. The structure suggests slow indoctrination, but Marling's writing and acting are so opaque that her character's decisions come off as completely arbitrary. She excels at expressing guarded determination, but seems incapable of expressing doubt, which robs Jane — and the movie — of any sense of dramatic urgency. Lacking depth or motivation, she is more plot device than protagonist.

However, Jane is a Dostoevsky character compared to the members of The East. The movie essentially cancels out its anti-corporate message by falling back on conservative clichés about activism — namely, the idea that activists are all just rich kids angry at their parents. Insultingly, "The East" treats this "revelation" as if it were an additional layer of depth — that is, not only are The East activists, but they're activists struggling against their own friends and families! By rooting, for example, Izzie's struggle for clean water in daddy issues, "The East" effectively divorces itself from any discussions of the environment or corporate responsibility. It ceases to be a movie about activism, and becomes a movie about slumming brats; as a result, all of its third-act discussions of activist ethics — that is, where one should draw the lines for a cause — are meaningless.

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