How many crimes have been committed before “The Dry” begins? One barbarous act we know about for sure: a man named Luke Hadler (Martin Dingle Wall) has been found dead, with a shotgun beside him, outside the town of Kiewarra. (It’s a fictional place, but the movie, adapted from the novel of the same name by Jane Harper, and directed by Robert Connolly, was filmed in the Australian state of Victoria.) Back at Luke’s house are the bodies of his wife and son, and it is presumed—for want of a better theory—that he killed them before taking his own life, though he left no note. The only blessing is that his baby daughter was spared. If she were old enough to give evidence, what would she say?
The second notable deed may not have been a crime at all. In 1991, a high-school student, Ellie Deacon (BeBe Bettencourt), died in a river near Kiewarra, at the age of seventeen. In flashbacks to that time, we see Ellie swimming and messing around with her pals—a girl named Gretchen (Claude Scott-Mitchell), plus the teen-age Luke (Sam Corlett) and his best friend, Aaron Falk (Joe Klocek). Ellie’s death was deemed to be accidental, but suspicion has always clung to it. Many locals believe that Aaron, in particular, knew more than he was prepared to tell.
In a bid to escape such rumors, Aaron left town, and made a life elsewhere. A successful life, too; he became a big-city cop. Now he is returning to attend the Hadlers’ funeral, in Kiewarra, where, reluctantly but inevitably, he gets sucked into mysteries old and new. He is greeted with something close to awe by the young neighborhood police officer, Greg Raco (Keir O’Donnell), who is about half his size, and with a snarling scorn by some of the other men. The women, on the whole, are more welcoming. Aaron rekindles his acquaintance with Gretchen (played as an adult by Genevieve O’Reilly), who invites him over to her place, whereupon he slightly spoils the mood by insinuating that she might be the murderer of Luke. So much for the kindling.
“The Dry” marks a double return—not just for Aaron but for Eric Bana, who plays him in the present day. It’s been a while since Bana made a major film in his native Australia. We’ve grown accustomed to his face in international hits like “Black Hawk Down” (2001), “Munich” (2005), “Star Trek” (2009), and “Lone Survivor” (2013), and to wondering, given that he began as a standup comedian, how hard it is for him to keep that face straight. “Troy” (2004) must have been especially challenging. Bana seems more at ease in the latest film: “Can I help you with something, mate?” is a typical response to a menacing situation. Yet his character is not a happy fellow, and his expression remains tensed and inward-gazing. What makes Aaron absorbing to watch is that along with the anxiety goes a firm and unswayable stride, and there are times, as he walks down Kiewarra’s main street, with its stores and bar, when the Hadleyville of “High Noon” (1952), patrolled by Gary Cooper, doesn’t feel too far away.
The plot of “The Dry,” it has to be said, is not a model of elegance and plausibility. I sniffed out the villain, who barely merits the description, a fair way off, and the dénouement, though it involves the threat of fire-starting, is the dampest of squibs. Yet the film has serious staying power. This is due in part to the actors, not least Bettencourt, who lends such luminosity to the ill-fated Ellie that we can easily see why the extinguishing of her life, long ago, continues to be mourned. What really drives the story, however, is the third, the largest, and the least soluble crime that it examines—not the demise of Luke Hadler, that is, but the cracks in the ground on which he lies and, nearby, the corpse of a leafless tree. “Luke and I used to come fishing out here,” Aaron says. “Look at it now.” From scenes like these, and from the words that appear onscreen near the beginning (“324 days since rain”), a question springs: Are we entering the zone of climate-change cinema, and, if so, what torrid forms will it take?
How works of art are brought forth not by defined historical events, like a war, but by the looming promise of peril can be hard to trace, all the more so when that promise has yet to be fulfilled. It is a critical commonplace, for instance, that film noir was shadowed by fears of nuclear war, although few of the clues are as blindingly clear as the radioactive box in “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955). What about the burst of white light, say, seen through the window of a child’s bedroom, in “The Big Heat” (1953)? The flash is that of a car bomb, but, for a terrible second, do we imagine a vaster glare? Likewise, in “The Dry,” is Aaron reflecting only on Ellie, as he stares at the creek where they used to splash about, or is he asking himself how on earth it dwindled into this bare and stony gulch?
You could argue, of course, that the parching is nothing new. Mel Gibson, in “Mad Max” (1980), didn’t exactly motor through green meadows, and “Wake in Fright” (1971)—the hero of which, like Aaron, takes a room in a secluded Australian town that’s weirdly difficult to leave—opens with a slow panoramic shot of semi-desert, in ochre and burnt sienna. Most movies seem like weak beer after “Wake in Fright,” whose ferocity is unquenched after fifty years, but what’s changed is that the desiccation to which “The Dry” bears witness may be here to stay. The title nods to the Big Dry, otherwise known as the Millennium Drought, which laid siege to Australia from roughly 1996 to 2010. In 2015, “Thirsty Country,” a report issued by the Climate Council of Australia, predicted a rise in the intensity and the frequency of heat waves and in the severity of droughts, following which “the relative risk of suicide can increase by up to 15 percent for rural males aged 30-49.” Which brings us full circle to Luke Hadler, dead in the dirt.
Whether “The Dry” can carry such a burden of intent, psychological and meteorological, is up for debate. Some viewers may regard the film as a doomy thriller with ideas above its station. Yet even they, I suspect, will be left with raw throats and a sense of trouble in store. Listen to Aaron, tired and begrimed by a long day’s policing, as he barks in despair at what emerges from the showerhead: a russet spurt, then nothing. And, as he drives out to the farmsteads, look at the arid flatlands that stretch to the horizon on either side. At one bewitching moment, three dust devils rise and dance—ghosts of the past, perhaps, or heralds of the barren years to come.
An old man is hurt in a traffic accident. He is taken to the E.R., where a doctor assesses his injuries. He tells her not to look into his eyes. “Keep her away from me!” he cries. When she tells him that he will require surgery, the old man agrees, on one condition: he should be anesthetized before she touches him.
Welcome to Saudi Arabia, and to “The Perfect Candidate,” the latest film from Haifaa Al Mansour. She earned acclaim as the director of “Wadjda”(2013), in which a young Saudi girl seeks to earn money for a bicycle—a machine for liberation—by reciting the Quran. This time, we have a grownup heroine in the shape of Maryam Al Saffan (Mila Al Zahrani), the doctor to whom the old man objects. She has not only a good job but also her own car, Saudi women having been graciously allowed to drive since 2018. And yet, in other ways, she is as constrained as the girl on the bike. To renew a travel permit, for example, Maryam needs the consent of a male guardian. More or less by accident, and in a nice comic irony, it is this quest for consent that leads her to sign up as a candidate for a seat on the municipal council. She decides to concentrate on one issue: the building of a paved road to her clinic.
In truth, the new film lacks the whirring fluency that brought such freshness to “Wadjda.” The story is awkwardly split between Maryam’s crusade and the exploits of her father, Abdulaziz (Khalid Abdulraheem), who, like Sir Walter Elliot, in “Persuasion,” is a widower with three daughters. If memory serves, though, Sir Walter never went on tour with his band, whereas Abdulaziz, a virtuoso on the lutelike oud, is away for weeks, leaving what he calls “this crazy campaign” to unfold. The pleasure of the film rests not in the plot, which is so placid as to be anti-dramatic, but in the minutiae; as ever, Al Mansour homes in on the everyday workings of condescension and conformity. Notice the woman who, when Maryam asks for her vote, replies, “My husband would kill me, but I’ll see what he says,” and the TV host who announces that, as a female candidate, Maryam will naturally want to focus on playgrounds and gardens. The look that she gives him is as friendly as frost. The eyes have it. ♦
