The Troubling Film About Grooming That Had Sundance Buzzing
When Palm Trees and Power Lines premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, it was one of the buzziest titles in Park City. The film is about a teenage girl, who is manipulated and abused by a man twice her age.
Directed by Jamie Dack, who co-wrote the screenplay with Audrey Finlay, Palm Trees and Power Lines tells the story a 17-year-old girl named Lea (Lily McInerny) who is charmed by a much older man named Tom (Jonathan Tucker), who promises a jolt of excitement in what she feels a distressingly mundane life. What she’s unaware of is how the relationship becomes predatory.
The film, then, balances a coming-of-age tale with a frank, if horrifying, depiction of the act of sexual grooming, which is the methodical manipulation of a person with the intent to exploit or abuse them. When it premiered at Sundance, The Hollywood Reporter called the film “a subtle and distressing portrayal of predation” and The Guardian called it “an unnerving, remarkable debut” for Dack, who also won the festival’s Best Director prize.
In this exclusive clip for The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, we see the seeds of that troubling relationship.
“This is one of the earliest conversations between Tom and Lea after they meet, and we can see right away that Tom is planting ideas of what ‘real freedom’ could look like for her,” Dack tells us. “And when Lea shares that she likes to sing, though playful, Tom takes her seriously. He sees her.
Watch the exclusive clip below:
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