An older man cajoles a young girl into his truck late one night. “Don’t murder me,” she scoffs, oblivious to the other, more insidious threats that he may represent. It’s a classic “stranger danger” setup presented by Jamie Dack in “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” her directorial debut, which she co-wrote with Audrey Findlay. Dack and Findlay’s screenplay, about the relationship between the young girl, 17-year-old Lea (Lily McInerny) and the older man, 34-year-old Tom (Jonathan Tucker) masterfully lays out the situation, with every red flag and warning sign plainly obvious, but situates the audience within Lily’s naive subjectivity so well that when she gets in the truck, we understand why.
The experience of watching “Palm Trees and Power Lines” and indeed, the journey of our young protagonist, is akin to a frog slowly being boiled. For Lea, it’s in the softly brutal manipulations of Tom, who weasels inside her mind and slowly takes control. For the audience, it’s in watching this unfold, and Dack does not let us look away or escape from what’s happening to Lea. Utilizing the “stranger danger” trope, we think this story is going a certain way — Lea’s friends snort that Tom is a “pedophile” and a “pervert” — but it’s far more than what initially meets the eye.
Dack alternates her approach to time and pacing in “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” lingering in moments that are challenging to endure, after skittering through snatched scenes of Lea’s stultifying summer break, in a bleakly dry Southern California suburb. She spends her time tanning and getting high with her friends, a group of crude, cruel teenagers, or hanging out with her mother (Gretchen Mol) who is hot or cold, depending on the state of her revolving door of boyfriends. Lea first encounters Tom in the parking lot of a diner late at night. She and her friends have dashed on the bill, and Lea has been collared by the cook. Tom comes to her rescue, and later ensures she gets home.
