Eric Bana soars in The Dry, an atmospheric, slow-burn tale of murder and long-festering secrets from the Australian outback. The Dry is as psychological as it is procedural.
Bana plays Aaron, a renowned big city police officer who returns to his remote, tiny hometown, for the funeral of his childhood best friend. The friend, with his wife and young son, have been shotgunned to death, and all signs point to a murder-suicide. The friends’ parents implore Aaron to see if there is another explanation.
That task is complicated by the act that Aaron is not welcomed by many in his hometown. His teen heartthrob was mysteriously drowned, and Aaron was a prime suspect, causing him to flee the town. Twenty years later, all he knows is that he didn’t do it and that he lied about his alibi.
As indicated by the title, writer-director Robert Connolly sets The Dry in Australian outback in the Climate Change. The vast, tinder-dry landscapes underscores the literal and psychological isolation of the locals.
Aaron, racked with feelings about the twenty-year-old mystery death, starts investigating the current day murders. He joins up with the inexperienced local cop, and they poke around the rural community over several, searingly hot days. It takes a while to get there, but I thought the payoff justified the slow pace; The Wife didn’t. Both of us were surprised when the The Real Killer was revealed.
Eric Bana’s performance as Aaron is superb. The whole movie is about Aaron trying to keep his investigative focus while being buffeted by feelings about his childhood friends and his hometown and the trauma that caused him to move away from them.
Because of his good looks and his physicality, Bana appears in a lot of big movies that don’t test his emotional range (Hulk, Troy, Black Hawk Down). But Bana is always good and even better in movies like Munich and Hanna, where we get to glimpse his thinking and feeling. For a really good and overlooked Eric Bana movie, I recommend the 2012 thriller Deadfall, available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The Dry played at SFFILM in April, but I missed it there. The Dry is now in Bay Area theaters and streaming on AppleTV, YouTube and Google Play.