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Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jamie Dack
Starring: Lily McInerny, Jonathan Tucker, Gretchen Mol, Quinn
Frankel
For her feature debut, director Jamie Dack has expanded her 2018
short Palm Trees and Power Lines. The title suggests natural beauty sullied by man, fitting for a tale
of a young girl who finds herself tainted and commodified by the
sinister ambitions of an older man.
17-year-old Lea (Lily McInerny) is bored senseless during the
summer holidays, growing tired of hanging out with her immature friends,
who have no interest in anything other than getting drunk and laid. She
has a fractious relationship with her single mother Sandra (Gretchen Mol), whom she accuses of neglecting her in favour of a string of
boyfriends.
One night Lea and her friends flee a diner without paying, but Lea is
nabbed by a cook who slaps her across the face. Coming to her rescue is
a thirtysomething man, Tom (Jonathan Tucker), who pulls the cook
off her, allowing her to escape. As she walks home, Tom pulls up beside
her in his truck and offers her a lift. Initially wary, Lea is won over
by Tom's charm, plus she had been eyeing him across the diner.
Everything about Tom spells danger, but we get the sense that Lea knows
this but is willing to take the risk, so dull has her life become. Plus,
it might even piss off her mom, or at least make her take notice of her
daughter. "Don’t murder me," Lea jokes before getting into Tom's
truck.
Dack and co-writer Audrey Findlay spend a good deal of time
allowing us to hang out with Lea before we get to this pivotal point,
establishing why she might be attracted to this older man. When Tom
notes her maturity, we've already seen how Lea stands out from her
stunted friends, so we understand why such a comment would strike a
chord with her. Unlike the boys her own age who expect sex at the drop
of a hat, Tom doesn't display such desire, allowing Lea to move things
along at her own pace. It's she who initiates their first sexual
encounter.
Of course, Tom is only making Lea feel that she's the one in control.
He knows exactly what to say and when to say it, and he has a plausible
answer for every red flag Lea sees fluttering in his aura. For much of
the film's first half we're unsure where this relationship is going, and
for a while we might be fooled into thinking we're watching a romance,
albeit one of a taboo nature. By the time Tom's true intentions begin to
be revealed, we've almost been seduced ourselves.
It's this investment into fashioning a believable relationship between
Tom and Lea that makes the second half pivot into thriller territory so
effective. This scenario has been covered in dozens of made-for-TV
movies, but Dack avoids the cheap moralising of such films, which makes
Lea's fate all the more worrying.
In her feature debut, McInerny is quite the find, thoroughly convincing
as a naïve 17-year-old despite being 22 at the time of filming. Had she
not been so compelling, like the 27-year-olds who tend to play teens in
these scenarios, the film's verisimilitude would have collapsed. It
greatly helps that we haven't seen McInerny before; unburdened by any
associations with previous roles, to us she simply is Lea.
While the movie certainly doesn't endorse Tom's behaviour, it observes
it from a distance, which makes it all the more disturbing. This is no
after-school special with a trite moral lesson for viewers to take away.
Characters behave in ways that frustrate us, because that's how people
really behave. We might scream at the screen for Lea to get herself out
of certain situations, but it's never guaranteed that she'll listen.
She's been let down by adults her whole life, so why would she listen?
The movie ends with a final disturbing moment that will test how much
you've bought into Lea's psyche by that point. Some critics have found
it a step too far, but I certainly bought it.
