The Dry, review: this absorbing, evocative thriller is full of surprises
117 min. Dir: Robert Connolly
The Dry begins in cold blood, with bodies shot dead in a farmhouse, somewhere in an arid province of Australia. Off a spattered corridor, we see a baby, screaming in its cot with no one living in earshot. It’s as if the camera is the first responder on this grisly scene.
Jane Harper’s much-acclaimed crime novel, which launched her career as a thriller writer, started in this same stark, forensic manner. It’s a genuine grabber, hooking us in to a satisfyingly complex, impressively airtight plot that feels ready-made for cinema.
The mystery revolves about two unsolved crimes, more than 20 years apart, in the parched, fictional town of Kiewarra a few hours’ drive from Melbourne. As it begins, a federal cop called Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) returns for the funeral of the baby’s parents and school-age brother, having abandoned this town under a cloud in his late teens. He intends to stay less than a day, walking Kiewarra’s streets with the wary tread of a man besieged by ghosts, and uncertain who his friends still are.
Back then, Aaron was the prime suspect in the case of a girlfriend, Ellie Deacon (BeBe Bettencourt), who drowned in a creek after he was the last person to see her alive. While the official verdict was suicide, her family have never come to terms with that explanation, and Aaron reopens a can of worms by showing his face after all these years.
His childhood friend Luke Hadler is the dead farmer, who had been deeply troubled, and the initial investigation is satisfied that he slaughtered his family, sparing the baby, before turning a shotgun on himself. Luke’s parents (Bruce Spence, an excellent Julia Blake) remain convinced of his innocence, begging for Aaron’s unofficial help in finding the true culprit. Lo and behold, almost everyone in town starts to look increasingly suspicious, from the other tight-lipped landowners (including Animal Kingdom’s James Frecheville) to Ellie’s intractably violent, hard-boozing relatives (Matt Nable, William Zappa).
The Dry announces up front that Kiewarra has gone 324 days without rain, a natural anomaly we could interpret as a miasma over the land, to be dispelled only when the truth comes out. No wonder everyone’s drinking so much. The riverbed in which Ellie washed up is now a cracked basin; flashbacks to the young Aaron (Joe Klocek) and Luke (Sam Corlett) with Ellie and their friend Gretchen (Claude Scott-Mitchell) almost all involve golden memories of a long day swimming together.
An ache of past regret might nag away persistently at Aaron, but there’s no doubt he’s relieved to have got out, whatever the true cause of Ellie’s death. Bana’s clenched, intuitive acting must carry the dramatic burden of long-harboured suspicions that Aaron’s never been able to verify, and new ones he wishes he didn’t have to entertain.
The gravely beautiful Genevieve O’Reilly does equally well as the adult Gretchen, a tough survivor perfectly matched in likeness with her younger counterpart. We don’t have her figured as the kind of person who trains a shotgun on rabbits to keep her land clear, using the same cartridges that obliterated the Hadler family, until we see her doing precisely that.
Thanks to this desiccated setting, disturbed by the vicious brawls of irredeemable barflies, Robert Connolly’s film can’t help but recall Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971), cinema’s definitive treatment of outback alcoholism and dead-end dread.
It’s not that good, partly because the sorrowful tone precludes being hideously funny in the same way. Still, it’s consistently absorbing as well as evocative to the harsh finish, with mordant plot surprises Connolly keeps smartly tucked away. The Dry has been a major hit in Australia, which makes future adaptations of Harper’s books seem close to assured. They’ll have a tough job improving on it.
On Sky Cinema and NOW from August 6
