The Dry (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

Detective Aaron Falk returns to his home of Kiewarra, Australia, for the funeral of a childhood friend, Luke, who murdered his wife and young son before turning his gun on himself. But Aaron's return is greeted mostly by furtive whispers and untrusting glares because he himself was a suspect some twenty years prior, when he left town. As he (and we) learn about what happened to Luke and his family, we also learn about Aaron's youth, when a teenage girl drowned and both he and Luke were implicated, lied to the police, and suffered ostracism. It only ended for Aaron when his family left town; apparently the intensity and stress never really ended for Luke. But now that he's back -- and in a sweltering drought, no less -- the town's old wounds open up like they'd never healed.

After Luke's parents convince Aaron that there is room for doubting Luke's guilt, he decides to stay and investigate the already closed case. He has to endure some difficult conversations with townsfolk, including the father of the dead teenager from Aaron's past and the local police chief (who is clearly green when it comes to violent crimes and dead bodies). Interspersed among these scenes are flashback scenes that show a young Aaron and Luke hanging out, flirting with girls, and ultimately the events that led to the drowning. The assumed credulity of these flashbacks reveals a lot of misinformation, projection, and misguided anger in the present, as the flashbacks establish a gap between what people thought about the past and what actually happened. And as present-day Aaron connects with the idiosyncratic townsfolk, he uncovers a lot of secrets, motivations, and guilts. What is going on in Kiewarra during this dry spell?

The Dry stars Eric Bana as the guilt-ridden, haunted detective, and it's smart enough to let him carry the film with his singularly moody demeanor. It's his best role in years, and he runs with it like the protagonist of a Gillian Flynn novel or a new season of True Detective. We're left wondering for most of the film's runtime exactly how guilty he really is about the previous murder, and Bana gives us almost no help, even refusing to deny accusations or claim innocence when confronted. Clearly he feels guilty, but how much and why are left for us to decipher as audience detectives, and the film trusts us to keep up with its not-so-verbose screenplay.

The film -- as is true with many Australian films -- highlights the landscape, with frequent establishing or transitional shots taking in the windswept, dusty fields around the rural farming town. Warm with amber light, the film exudes its heat right out of the screen, transporting us to a land choking for air and water. We see dust devils on the plains, and often an overhead shot of the riverbed where the teenage girl drowned before, now a rocky crevice splitting the landscape. The townsfolk, primarily farmers who can't currently farm, are made to sit around lazily waiting for rain, gossiping about the crimes of the past and present and the ghosts tied to this town. I wondered a few times if the film would tip into wider issues, such as the danger in these small towns of dying out due to capitalist/corporate farming, or some deeper distrust of law enforcement or forensics (there is an underlying motif of powerlessness experienced by every single character), but it never really went there. It was just a fairly engrossing, beautiful to watch and unwind, whodunnit in the outback.