Direction: Robert Connolly
Country: Australia / USA
In The Dry, two murder cases are solved by a celebrated federal agent who returns to his arid hometown, Kiewarra, twenty years after he has left in an emotional turmoil. Eric Bana gives more body than soul to this groomed law enforcer who, helped by an insecure local sergeant (Keir O'Donnell), investigates the recent murder suicide that implicates a childhood friend. Concurrently, he tries to decipher in his head what could have happened to his girlfriend back then, who was found dead in a river that is now parched. The two cases might be connected.
A desperate small farming community, a bunch of aggressive and surreptitious suspects, successive lies and shady moves are part of a screenplay co-written by director Robert Connolly (Balibo) and Harry Cripps (Penguin Bloom), who adapted Jane Harper’s novel of the same name.
It’s better the idea than the execution since the film plays as an over-plotted murder-mystery with an anticlimactic outcome. What went wrong with this adaptation? It simply collapses under the weight of its tonally one-note developments and clunky narrative.
