Robert Connolly’s “The Dry” is a moody, atmospheric, and not altogether successful mystery thriller that allows yet another opportunity to ask one of the pressing cinematic questions of our time: how is Eric Bana still not a giant movie star in America? He fronted a Steven Spielberg movie (admittedly, “Munich’s” reception was… complicated), he fronted a Marvel movie (admittedly, “Hulk’s” reception was… mixed), he’s done comedy and drama and horror and romance, and though his name remains above the title, it’s never really meant anything to audiences on these shores.
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“The Dry” finds him back in his homeland of Australia, under the direction of native Robert Connolly, who also co-wrote the script (adapted from Jane Harper’s novel). The opening images are grisly and arresting: an isolated farmhouse, filled by the cries of a baby, blood caked on the walls, flies buzzing the dead bodies on the floor. It was a murder-suicide, a man killing his wife and child (but sparing the infant) before turning the gun on himself.
“I’m an old mate of Luke’s, actually,” explains Aaron Falk (Bana) when he turns up at the funeral. They grew up together in Kiewarra, a small town in the outback, though he left as a teen and is now a hotshot federal agent. But Aaron is haunted by their shared past, and from the picture’s opening, this story is intermingled with flashbacks to their youth; a girl drowned, and one or both of them may have been responsible.
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Aaron’s unresolved guilt makes him more receptive to Luke’s parents, who insist Luke didn’t commit this grisly act – he could never do something like that – and implore him to investigate the killing spree. And thus we have a double-mystery framework, intercutting what happened then with what’s happening now, underlining the long shadow the past casts over the present, and how many old wounds haven’t yet closed. “You think you’re gonna get the truth in a town like this?” Aaron is asked, pointedly. “When you’ve been lying about something for so long, it becomes second nature.”
This kind of narrative channel-surfing is, paradoxically, easier to sustain over the course of a novel than a tight two-hour motion picture; the secrets of the teenage story are pulled out with taffy-like torpor, and while it’s silly to call anything in a mystery story manipulative, it does indeed begin to feel, in the picture’s second half, like they’re just toying with us. More importantly, the gearshifts keep interrupting the emotional through-line of both stories. And the solutions, when they come, are – in differing ways – a little hard to swallow. (Connolly also treads into some disturbing brutality at the conclusion – a flashback we don’t need to see, at least not at the service of what is, essentially, a psycho-pop thriller. A film has to earn a sequence that incendiary; this one doesn’t.)
But there’s quite a bit here that works. The pacing is deliberate but not indulgent, and Stefan Duscio’s cinematography takes in the wide, cracked landscapes of the drought-ridden outback with hushed reverence. Connolly’s wise reliance on lingering close-ups allows Duscio to treat the actors’ faces in much the same way, giving the picture a crisp, businesslike quality, even when indulging in some unfortunate visual clichés; even an actor of Bana’s skill can’t pull off the old “waking up from a nightmare” thing like it’s fresh.
But, y’know, points for trying. Bana is one of the producers of “The Dry,” and it’s not hard to see why he wanted to act the role, which is uniquely suited to his specific talents – his potent mixture of brusque physicality and barely bottled emotion. Connolly is a patient enough director to let us take in the pain this man holds in his face and the quiet power in his eyes. But also, as ever, there’s a capacity for darkness in Bana’s characterization, a faint hint that he may hold some unthinkable secret, which lends the past-tense mystery more suspense than it probably deserves. That’s exactly the kind of duality that might have made him too complex for conventional stardom. But perhaps that’s for the best; plenty of compelling actors have short-circuited promising careers to play superheroes. Bana’s doing something more interesting these days than that. [B-]
“The Dry” arrives in select theaters and VOD on May 21.