Australian Thriller The Dry, Starring Eric Bana

Eric Bana in The Dry.
Picture: Ben King/IFC Movies

The brand new Australian thriller The Dry is full of such an awesome sense of grief, of remorse and grim foreboding, that you could be lose sight of the central thriller for stretches of the film. That’s to not counsel that Robert Connolly’s movie can’t perform as style leisure; quite the opposite, it’s a gripping, grisly piece of labor. However its emotional emphasis lies elsewhere, past the mere ins and outs of who did what the place and to whom.

The movie was an enormous hit in Australia earlier this yr, and is now opening within the U.S. in choose theaters and on demand by way of IFC. It follows a federal agent, Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), as he returns after a few years to his drought-stricken rural hometown of Kiewarra to look right into a ghastly murder-suicide: Apparently, Aaron’s closest good friend from childhood, Luke (Martin Dingle-Wall), has shot and killed his spouse and son earlier than taking his personal life. No one fairly is aware of why, and regardless that there are some telling inconsistencies within the proof, the struggling city is greater than prepared to simply accept the matter as settled.

Aaron’s poking round, in different phrases, will not be significantly welcome — particularly provided that many on the town nonetheless imagine he was in some way concerned within the loss of life of one among his and Luke’s closest associates, Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt), who drowned beneath suspicious circumstances 20 years in the past within the river the place, as youngsters, they spent a lot of their time. As Aaron investigates the more moderen killing, flashbacks slowly reveal what occurred between him, Luke, Ellie, and one other shut good friend, Gretchen (performed as an grownup by the great Genevieve O’Reilly). If Luke was certainly liable for these killings within the current day, may he even have been liable for Ellie’s mysterious loss of life — and, if that’s the case, does that imply Aaron may need unwittingly enabled his good friend within the homicide?

It’s a tangle of suspicion, disgrace, and buried reminiscence, and the land turns into one thing of a metaphor for the corrosive energy of evil as Aaron wanders round this shriveled, devastated group. The drought has turned huge stretches of the realm into dry scrub. Something inexperienced seems to have vanished from the earth, and the streets go empty come dusk. He visits the forest and river the place they performed as youngsters and the place Ellie died. Now, it’s simply dry wasteland, all cracks and mud. An environment of barren dread permeates the movie, enhanced immeasurably by Peter Raeburn’s elegantly moody rating.

Few performers over time have been nearly as good at quietly conveying thought as Bana: He has a number of the most expressive eyes within the enterprise. Whereas some actors make us surprise what’s happening inside their heads, Bana has an uncanny means to tell us precisely what’s happening inside his head with out uttering a phrase — thereby pulling us into his characters’ interior conflicts. On the floor, he performs Aaron as a peaceful, methodical skilled, at all times assessing the state of affairs and the proof at hand. However there’s a vindictive gleam in his eye as effectively, and for all his by-the-books strategy to the case, there’s a streak of self-destructiveness to this haunted man’s quest for the reality. He could seem sturdy and dependable, however Aaron is a chaos agent at coronary heart — each investigator and avenging angel.

As The Dry proceeds, we be taught extra concerning the circumstances round, and the implications of, Ellie’s loss of life, and we see how the city turned on Aaron and his father. Betrayal and rage, it appears, have festered inside him for years, and now he initiatives the suspicion again onto the city itself. To Aaron, everybody right here looks as if a possible killer, even these closest to him; a rekindled romance with Gretchen is consumed by each his guilt and his suspicion. (It helps, in fact, that the script by Connolly and Harry Cripps, adapting Jane Harper’s novel, expertly deploys a number of compelling purple herrings over the course of the investigation.)

With so many flashbacks and suspects, The Dry may have simply change into mired in episodic tedium, however grief is the glue that holds the story collectively. It’s uncommon for a thriller to mourn a lot with its characters. Often, such movies dose us with a little bit of bereavement early on, to set the emotional stakes, after which go alongside their merry style manner. However the extra Aaron investigates, the extra sorrow he appears to uncover. By the point the movie’s climax rolls round, we get the dutiful revelations, however we don’t actually get something resembling closure. The Dry is a gorgeous thriller that leaves us not with explanations, however with overwhelming disappointment.

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