THE DRY: When It Rains, It Pours

Robert Connolly‘s dust bowl noir The Dry is a desolate, outback murder mystery where the haunted qualities of its hero and the drought-stricken town he descends upon is edged with an undeniable bleakness that puts the full stop on the stark cinematic year it’s been released in. Concurrently, it’s also a languid adaptation of Jane Harper‘s smash-hit novel of the same name, another grim affair of a stoic policeman with a troubled past infiltrating an isolated town and unmasking its modest facade to find a tangled network of blackmail, sexual liaisons, and troubled psychology.

In the shadow of recent television thrillers like The Kettering Incident and Broadchurch – and roughly 50% of the BBC’s modern output – The Dry is incarnated with the undeniable form of a truncated miniseries, both in its muted televisual style and its anecdotal, episodic pacing that exposes the emerging fine-line between our crumbling cinematic prestige and the rise of populist streaming content.

Coming Home

As the title implies, The Dry focuses on a community deprived of life; in the wake of a tragic murder-suicide, where father Luke (Martin Dingle Wall) is accused of killing his wife and son before turning the gun on himself, Australian Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) returns to his hometown of Kiewara to pay respects to his childhood friend. This is not a humble return, as the well-composed cop finds himself grazing against the hostile locals, who still hold a deep-seated grudge about the unsolved drowning death of Ellie (Bebe Bettencourt) where the fingers were sternly pointed at Aaron and Luke, practically forcing the former out of town decades prior.

In poetic defiance of being a community clocking in 324 days without rain, Aaron’s reappearance reminds us that when it rains, it pours, and this flood showers the town when Luke’s bereaved parents task the visiting lawman with digging into why, or even if, Luke would’ve executed such a tragic massacre. With a chip on his shoulder and two unresolved deaths on his mind, Aaron decides to team up with local enforcement (an army of one rendered by Keir O’Donnell) to undergo a termitic burrowing into the serene neighbourhood that already fiercely shunned him – and isn’t afraid to do so again.

With an emotional withholding that allows the audience a space to rummage within the scratchy, intermittent flashbacks to Aaron’s troubled past, Eric Bana‘s hard-nosed performance allows Aaron’s rage to manifest itself into a pure shielding device to the various local denizens he constantly pinballs between. Every possible suspect in the case, whether it be Matt Nable‘s abrasive construction worker or the shady school principal played by Jon Polson, is squarely handled by Bana‘s everyman amiability and gentle ocker charm to slide each alibi out of the recurring red herrings he encounters – all except for Genevieve O’Reilly, a former childhood flame that may be the only person to ignite something within the forensic-minded man.

Aaron’s internal renovation never lapses into cheap melodrama, avoiding obvious saccharine insights as his dual investigations find themselves linked thematically, rather than a contrived literal connection. Interrupting the slow-burn drama at regular intervals, these on-going flashes from the past could’ve been more neatly woven into the fabric of the film, as the eventual discoveries abandon any ambiguity in the name of an unmerited conclusion that goes against the expressed themes of how manipulative grief and bereavement can be on our memory, or as James Frecheville‘s gruff fireman states: “When you’ve been lying about something for so long, it becomes second nature”.

Conclusion

There’s just enough mystery and intrigue lingering at every begrimed frame of The Dry to keep the audience invested as its parallel secrets slowly unspool, but this modest, seemingly scattered affair never quite rises above its television aesthetics and lack of formal ambition.

The Dry will be available in Australian theaters on January 1st, 2021.

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