Mark Reviews Movies: THE DRY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 20, 2021

There are two mysteries at the center of The Dry, but co-writer/director Robert Connolly's film is as much about the mentality that gives rise to such mysteries as the mysteries themselves. Decades ago in a small Australian town, a teenage girl was found dead, drowned in a river. A few days before the start of this story, an entire family, save for a newborn baby, was killed in the same town. The murderer seems to be the husband/father, who shot his wife and young son, before going to the dirt of a dried-up lake and shooting himself.

The two tragedies share some common elements. The apparent killer was friends with the girl who died many years ago. Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), who has since become a decorated officer with the federal police, was friends with both of them. Rumors about the drowning death have been swirling and have persisted since it happened. Aaron was seen as the prime suspect, if the girl's death wasn't a suicide, so when he returns to this town to attend the funeral of his old friend and the friend's family, he's met with all of that suspicion yet again, left to stew for a couple of decades.

That's the premise of Connolly and Harry Cripps' screenplay, adapted from Jane Harper's 2016 novel. The real point of this tale, though, is how these deaths—separated by decades but connected by certain people, a sense of communal tragedy, and the prevalence of public gossip and allegations surrounding them—are also the catalysts for uncovering the secrets that no one talks about but everyone more or less knows.

By the end, we know who killed these four people—the teenager long ago and the family more recently—and why, but the answers offer little to no solace or sense of finality. The secrets and mysteries will go on in this place, simmering and occasionally boiling over as people ignore or refuse to talk about what really matters. In this town, the only thing worse than not knowing is the fear that people will know your own sins.

Aaron arrives in his old hometown from his new home in Melbourne, planning to stay for the funeral and leave the following day. A few things delay his departure. First, there are the parents (played by Julia Blake and Bruce Spence) of his old friend, the one who, from the evidence, almost certainly murdered most of his family and committed suicide. They cannot believe their son would commit such a heinous crime and want Aaron to investigate the possibility that someone else did.

The area has been suffering a drought for months, so perhaps the son had to borrow money from people who might kill if it the cash wasn't repaid. With some help from a local cop named Greg (Keir O'Donnell), who first found the bodies of the family and hasn't recovered from the trauma, Aaron starts looking into his dead friend's financials and acquaintances.

Another reason for Aaron to stick around is Gretchen (Genevieve O'Reilly), another friend from his teenage years, who was also friends with the apparent murderer and the girl who drowned. She works at the local school, where her own son attends and the murdered child attended. They catch up on their lives and reminisce about the past, always talking around the more complicated truths and painful memories.

Those memories are as important to the narrative as the contemporary investigation. Through flashbacks, we see how a younger Aaron (played by Joe Klocek) and Gretchen (played by Claude Scott-Mitchell), as well as Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt) and Luke (Sam Corlett), lived a seemingly ideal life—until Ellie was found dead in the river where the group often played. Connolly takes the unspoken suspicions of this place as a challenge, leaving plenty of room for us to wonder about Aaron's part in the girl's death (if any) and making the federal cop's own doubts about his friend, who played rough and was the one to arrange an alibi for the boys after Ellie's death, clear. Maybe the answers to both sets of deaths are that simple, but Aaron won't voice that notion. To do so would be to admit there's also a straight line from his earlier silence about Luke to the recent murders.

There is an overwhelming sense of uncertainty to every element of this story—past and present. The key is that Connolly presents that, not as a means of distraction and deflection, but in order to create an atmosphere of rumor, suspicion, and guilt.

Characters enter this story, not as potential suspects or likely red herrings, but as reflections of this overriding mood. Jamie (James Frecheville) insists he was shooting rabbits with Luke just before the man apparently killed his family and himself (The touch of measuring time in the number of beers drunk feels especially authentic), and that reminds Aaron of the alibi from the past. Ellie's father (played by William Zappa) still believes Aaron murdered his daughter and makes public scenes of his suspicions. Clues emerge, and people are questioned, as per usual. What's unusual and most admirable, though, is how every new possibility and dead end carries a weight of hopelessness and regret, thanks, in significant part, to Bana's stoically internalized performance.

We do receive the solutions to both mysteries here, which are satisfying only in terms of the logic of the paths arriving at them. The Dry concerns itself primarily with its air of mourning—that people will not speak of their troubles—and despair—that the unspoken can and does kill.

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