Review: THE DRY

Aerial shots of cracked farmland give way to a murder scene. A woman lies in a hallway, blasted with a shotgun. A baby screams in the next room. Later, in distant Melbourne, AFP officer Aaron Falk prepares to attend the funeral of the supposed murderer, husband of the woman and high school friend Luke. Complicated? Well, he's also responding to a handwritten note telling him that he and Luke both lied. No further clues. Right. Leave of absence. Trip to the country.

Falk drives right into an unresolved past event and a plea from the parents of the accused and deceased to look into the recent murder. Well, he can't do that officially so he has to chum up with the local sergeant of police. Along the way he reunites with old high school chum Gretchen, still sexy young single mum. They used to hang out and, wahey! we're back in our teens, splashing about in a head high creek in a richer and more fertile age. As Falk wanders the old haunts he comes across the creek, now a dustbowl, and remembers with horror seeing another of the teen quartet lifted lifeless from the water, Ellie Deacon, the girl he is strongly suspected of murdering (his alibi is the lie of the note).... Ok, ok: this is a return-western in the bush and has all the elements but adds a vintage murder to a contemporary one. 

What's good is a strong, smellable sense of the country and the colours of drought. Good, too, is the decidedly non-American style of personal interaction and dialogue which I haven't seen at the cinema since the great Noise in 2007. I love scores that alternate synthesis with orchestration and know when to blend them: the music in this film is swoon great. Performances are up there with a few unsteady moments; it's always good to see Eric Bana command a scene in his own accent; the younger friends are also very naturalistic. Oh, and very good to see some vets on screen like Bruce Spence, John Polson and Julia Blake.

What's not good is that it plays like a novel, giving us time spent on inconsequential action and needless overstatement of relationships and restatement of stances like resentment here or crushes there. This works in a novel where a reader demands a sense of place and time passing but in a feature film, unless these things are going to find commitment into narrative threads, they run like soap opera. It's not the place of any review to how a film might be augmented for improvement but the real power in the revelatory scenes here is almost upstaged by a evening of the stakes to the extent that the crucial moments can drag when they should compel. Cut out twenty minutes of establishments we don't need and keep the focus on the twin mysteries and you'd have an eerie murder mystery with a can't-go-home-again theme. Ah well....