The Dry (2020)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

The Dry (2020) – R. Connolly

I don’t think it’s cultural cringe to say that even though it is great to see Australia and its issues up there on the screen, there’s something that still feels amateurish about some of our output, including The Dry. Eric Bana is the brooding Federal cop who returns home to regional Victoria from Melbourne when an old childhood friend dies in a murder-suicide. Soon, he can’t help himself from investigating the crime (to discover whether his friend really was the killer) and we learn through fleeting flashbacks and the angry reactions of long-time residents that Bana’s character was also a suspect in a possible murder years earlier. The interweaving of the past and present is expertly managed by director Robert Connolly but the plot soon descends into a standard whodunit with an array of suspects and red herrings from which to choose. I didn’t guess correctly myself, expecting that the synergies between past and present would play out as predicted, but the film takes a turn into much darker territory instead. A better film might have interrogated that darkness more but it’s good that The Dry is willing to broach the subject and a few additional problem areas as well. We need more films to do this.