Home Movie Reviews ‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’ Review: Lily McInerny Is Outstanding in Jamie Dack’s Emotionally Annihilating Feature Debut

This harrowing portrait of youth captures the immense cruelty that can come from those closest to us.

Image via Momentum Pictures

As a genre, the coming-of-age film can be a malleable one. This is true both in how each generation will encounter its own challenges and also face down difficulties that transcend time. There are works that look at the way anger can become part of our realities from a young age and others that explore how society’s repression can maintain their hold over our futures. There are aspects of each of these elements that are woven through writer-director Jamie Dack’s debut feature Palm Trees and Power Lines. First premiering back at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, it delicately yet decisively looks at the life of the 17-year-old Lea (Lily McInerny) as she tries to find her way in the world. Taking place over summer break in the Southwest, it begins with her feeling disconnected from her peers and frustrated with her troubled mother. When out one night at a diner, she makes eye contact with Tom (Jonathan Tucker) who winks at her as he leaves. It is a moment that marks the beginning of a disquieting journey that is as unsettling as any horror film that will come out this year.
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When Lea is abandoned by her immature friends who ditched out on paying their bill, Tom suddenly appears and gets to play the hero by helping her escape from an angry employee. He then follows her in his truck, persistently offering to give her a ride home until she relents. When Lea asks him how old he is, Tom says that he is 34. Even as she responds by informing him that she is half his age, he still takes her number anyway. He sighs as if he can’t believe that he is doing this, but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to increase his control over Lea. What starts as conversations in the bed of his truck by the railroad turns to trips to the beach and other outings that serve to isolate her from almost everyone else she knows.

He isn’t always outwardly creepy and is instead more calculated as he strategically cranks up the charm to win her over. Where everyone else seems to disregard what it is that Lea cares about, it is Tom who asks her what it is that she thinks and wants for her life. Any initial hesitancy she may have had of spending time with him soon melts away as he begins dropping hints about how they should just run away together. The fact that he is grooming her places the film on the perpetual edge of a cliff. Even as we see he is most certainly going to push her off of it, the fact that Lea does not makes it all the more painful to witness.

Image via Momentum Pictures

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Dack’s direction hardly gives us a moment to breathe as conversational scenes grow more and more extended just as they ratchet up the dread. Tom will get urgent texts and phone calls that he explains away as being related to work, though we don’t get much of a great idea of what that is. When Lea asks to go back to his place, he takes her to a cheap motel where they drink alcohol out of Styrofoam cups. He says that this is just temporary and offers some nonsense excuse that rings hollow. That all of this is the opposite of glamorous is precisely the point. It is not meant to be completely convincing as he is testing how much he can prey upon her need for connection. Everything is tactical so that he can completely break down her boundaries. He knows not to push it too far too fast, making it feel like he has done this many times before.

The alarm bells that are blaring only increase as a waitress later asks Lea directly if she needs help as she recognizes Tom from when he has come to her restaurant with girls before. When she tells him about this, he goes back inside and aggressively confronts the woman. We aren’t made privy to what he says, part of how the film does do quite a bit of withholding, but the silence makes his mask slipping all the more sinister.

The thing about sociopaths is that they are good at manipulating people and Tucker executives this perfectly. Though he has previously done great acting in supporting roles in shows like Snowfall, his work here as the character descends into being more and more despicable while keeping a smile plastered on his face makes the skin crawl. However, through all of this, it is McInerny who holds it all together. Though she briefly appeared in the lackluster series Tell Me Lies, it is her feature debut performance here that captures the particulars of the character with a precision that feels like she has been in countless films. Both she and Dack ensure that the story never once falls into looking down on Lea for the decisions that she makes. Rather, it seeks to understand what it is that would drive her to seek out a relationship with a man who is clearly bad for her. It is the type of film that challenges the way callous observers will pick apart and judge the decisions of those being exploited. Instead, it asks the bigger questions about how a culmination of factors in her life all brought her into the trap that Tom had set. This makes for a conclusion that is unreservedly grueling.

Image via Sundance

It is surprising in some respects how far it goes, but it is also depressingly expected once you look back on everything in retrospect. There is one scene that plays out in a hotel room without cuts that, while Dack shoots it from afar, starts to feel absolutely suffocating. It places you so completely in Lea’s mindset as you feel her desperation to be literally anywhere else in her pacing back and forth. Without going into too much detail, this then morphs into a devastatingly empty look that passes across her face as she dissociates and fixates on something else as a way of coping with the stress. There is compassion to how it is portrayed even as it is capturing the most immensely awful thing one could see on screen. Though vastly different in genre, it echoes elements of the approach Jennifer Kent took to capturing violence in her magnificent film The Nightingale. The way the camera is used ensures that, at key moments, we are almost completely placed in the perspective of Lea. Completely and without reservation, we are invited to feel every single emotion that she feels.

Even though it can feel like it is a little lost towards the end as it expands far beyond the original short, that is by design. It almost serves as a tragically poetic mirroring of how Lea herself is lost as she tries to piece her life back together. When she is then faced with the feeling that there may actually be no pieces left, the final scene all the way up to the last line hits like a truck. It leaves wreckage in its wake as the psychological and emotional scars linger for us as an audience just as they do for its central character caught in the grasp of a cruel world.

Rating: B+

Palm Trees and Power Lines is in theaters and on VOD starting March 3.