ASLEEP IN MY PALM - Mark Reviews Movies

Asleep in My Palm, Hideout Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 29, 2024

Asleep in My Palm is the story of a father who has seen too much of what the world, as well as humanity, has to offer and, because of that, a daughter who has seen too little of it. Writer/director Henry Nelson's debut film deals with such extremes, but for the most part, its storytelling is subtle, considered, and intimate.

The father is named Tom (Tim Blake Nelson, the filmmaker's father), and he's a man who has lived off the grid almost as long as his 16-year-old daughter has been alive. She's Beth Ann (Chloë Kerwin), who hasn't known any certainty or a steady place to call home since heading out with her father to this wandering life.

At the moment, they're shacked up in a rental storage unit outside a university somewhere in Ohio. Tom earns cash by stealing things people don't need or forgot about, meaning they don't really need it, and selling them, in this place, to Jose (an amusingly pathetic Jared Abrahamson), a lonely guy who's desperate for Tom to see him as a friend. Tom doesn't have any friends, though, because he and Beth Ann could need to leave at a moment's notice. Plus, he's not exactly the sociable type, anyway.

At first, the story follows Tom on his thieving outings, his begrudging trips with Jose, and time spent with Beth Ann discussing philosophy while exercising or looking for "new" clothes to wear. The man knows a lot about such matters, and Nelson plays him with the kind of jaded curtness and, when he does get talking, utmost certainty that comes from someone who might be too intelligent for his own good. In a way, that's how he ended up in this situation, after joining the military during the First Gulf War in order to see what people are actually like and learning to distrust his fellow humans as a result of that experience.

Later, Beth Ann has her own adventure on the college campus, involving a group of Satanists, a privileged young woman (played by Gus Birney) who admires the teen's freedom, and realizing just how much of modern, everyday experiences she has never known. Kerwin is quite good here, too, highlighting that Beth Ann knows how to pretend to be mature but is just a kid, stuck in an isolated way of life and not even knowing what she wants for herself, beneath it all.

The film is patient, taking its time to establish these routines, and pointed in its examination of the increasingly unsettling dynamics between the father and daughter, who exist in a kind of co-dependent bond that's likely not to be broken by either one's choice. If Asleep in My Palm makes that reality a bit too plainly clear by way of a late development that explains a lot about the nature of these lives, that doesn't change the insights provided by this character study up until the ultimate point that our perspective of these characters changes.

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