Sundance 2022: Cha Cha Real Smooth, Palm Trees and Power Lines, Alice, Blood | Festivals & Awards

In the end, Andrew has a bit of a savior complex with not just Domino but a lot of people in his life, and he really learns that this is a time when he needs to experience his own party, not just get them going for other people. It’s a smart film that ends up also being surprisingly moving. We all have these messy chapters in our life. Sometimes I miss mine.

A very different story of formative youth unfolds in Jamie Dack’s powerful “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” a disturbing story of the ease of predation. A character study that’s anchored by a moving breakthrough performance from Lily McInerny, and one that ably supports and balances it from Jonathan Tucker, Dack’s film needs trigger warnings for everyone, but especially those who have dealt with sexual abuse. It’s unsparing in its vision of evil, revealing how mundane it can look to outsiders who aren’t willing to really see what’s going to happen.

McInerny plays Lea, a 17-year-old who is stuck in a dead-end chapter of her life. Her mother (Gretchen Mol) is rarely around and her friends kind of suck. It’s a time when people often fill their nights with bland, drunken apathy, punctuating them with the occasional hook-up in a cramped car. Of course, someone like Lea is going to be interested in a handsome older man like Tom (Tucker) when he praises her intelligence, encourages her future, and compliments her looks. She’s getting none of that elsewhere. And people like Tom know this. It’s the strategy of the predator, grooming children with attention to get what they want from them.

“Palm Trees and Power Lines” is grounded by the natural, effective performances of McInerny and Tucker, two performers who never feel like they’re playing theme or message, only character. Dack also smartly employs realism, never falling prey to the lyricism of films that sometimes feel like their distancing characters like Lea and Tom, or, even worse, looking down on Lea. There’s empathy in taking people like Lea seriously as human beings and not turning her into a thematic mouthpiece or artistic invention, and that’s what makes the final scenes of “Palm Trees” so powerfully hard to watch. And then, after the horror has begun to subside, Dack saves one of her hardest punches for last, and we leave this movie reeling.

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