Summary

Asleep in My Palm is a story of characters asserting their agency through romantic exploration.
Tim Blake Nelson shines in a dramatic role, while newcomer Chloë Kerwin holds her own next to the veteran actor.
The film’s visual style is a standout, with Ohio’s brutal winter serving as a powerful backdrop for the characters’ struggles.

It’s misleading to say that Asleep in My Palm is a tale of sexual awakening. If anything, romantic exploration is merely a tool for the characters to assert their agency. The movie marks Henry Nelson’s directorial debut and features his father, Tim Blake Nelson, starring and producing. As Henry Nelson also wrote the film, it’s interesting to see how much it explores the nature of parent-child relationships. Tom (Blake Nelson) is an impoverished father who tries to build a life for his daughter, Beth Anne (Chloë Kerwin). However, he soon finds he can’t keep her from the world forever.

Asleep in My Palm is a drama film directed by Henry Nelson and released in 2023. A father and his daughter live in rural Ohio as they live perpetually on the run from their violent past until things are complicated further by the daughter’s need for freedom and independence.ProsAsleep in My Palm finds its strength in its human connectionsThe performances are what ground the film ConsThe film’s pacing could have been betterThe story gets caught up in moralizing and repitition

Tom’s fear and hatred of the world are all that Beth Anne knows, but she is pulled toward companionship outside her small world.

In the middle of winter break on the outskirts of a college campus, Tom and Beth Anne live on the fringes of society. Tom is happy with their isolation and prefers that they keep their distance from the students and the town’s residents. Conversely, Beth Anne tries to hide her discontent from her father, whom she loves. However, she’s tired of feeling like an outsider looking in on a life she will never be able to inhabit. Tom’s fear and hatred of the world are all that Beth Anne knows, but she is pulled toward companionship outside her small world.

Tim Blake Nelson Gives A Standout Performance
Which elevates the emotional impact of newcomer Chloë Kerwin.

Blake Nelson is best known for his performance in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and his work as a character actor. However, this doesn’t stop him from stepping into the dramatic role and capturing the audience’s attention in every scene. Tom is a complicated man, and Nelson’s script shines in its ability to make us empathize with him deeply. He often assumes the role of mouthpiece for communicating the central themes and moral lessons of the movie. This characterizes him as the source of all knowledge for both us and Beth Anne.

Kerwin may be early in her career, but she already holds her own next to a veteran like Blake Nelson. The easy intimacy and rapport of a parent and child bonded by hardship and struggle comes naturally to both actors. Tom does not show as much emotion as Beth Anne, allowing Kerwin to assert herself using her vulnerability. In the film’s most crushing moment, she attempts to connect with college student Millah (Gus Birney) and is rejected. While the stakes are higher for the lonely Beth Anne, it’s a feeling anyone who was once a teenager knows well.

The characters tell us exactly what they think or use thinly veiled metaphors to communicate the same point one too many times within the same conversation.

Performances aside, the pacing could be faster, and some scenes with extended dialogue could do with cuts. The characters tell us exactly what they think or use thinly veiled metaphors to communicate the same point one too many times within the same conversation. That being said, the dialogue is compelling, if occasionally repetitive. While the film’s open-ended conclusion could be read as the nature of life not providing a neatly wrapped ending, it does leave us with the slight sense that Nelson had run out of ideas following the last-second twist in the third act.

Conversely, Nelson’s strength is the definitive nature of his visual style. Ohio’s brutal winter plays as large a role as any of the characters. The warmth of the ramshackle home that Beth Anne and Tom have created is juxtaposed with the sterile atmosphere of the college dorms. This metaphor is poignant but verges on being too on the nose. During their adventures, the cavernous empty warehouses Tom and Beth Anne explore are filled with magic, but only for those capable of seeing it. They’re also just as full of the isolation Tom sees as vital to survival in this life.

The division between the college students and Beth Anne is diminished by the film’s final twist.

The final twist completely changes the story and undercuts much of the class critique the plot hinges on. While this humanizes the wealthy college students, it takes away from the experience of the two leads that we have been rooting for. It’s an example of how Asleep in My Palm can’t make up its mind about society. Technology is condemned for leading individuals to be shallow, but it also connects them. Beth Anne and Tom share happy memories, and she cannot separate him and his lessons from her identity. However, she realizes that some of his actions are unforgivable.

In some ways, the big reveal between Beth Anne and Tom is an extreme example of the realization that every child comes to in their life: That their parents are people. Beth Anne is left mourning her childhood, the idolization of her father, and the fact that she doesn’t know where she fits into the adult world. The isolation Tom enforces on them exacerbates these feelings, but they’re still universal. Asleep in My Palm succeeds when it finds the human connection in its message, but gives too much time to moralizing conversations and not enough to character arcs.

Asleep in My Palm

will be in theaters on March 1 and available digitally on March 19.

Asleep in My Palm Director Henry Nelson Studio(s) Red Barn Films , Hideout Pictures Distributor(s) Strike Back Studios Writers Henry Nelson Cast Tim Blake Nelson , Grant Harvey , Gus Birney , Jared Abrahamson , David Aaron Baker Runtime 88 Minutes