Change Your Image
marciabaila-80101
Reviews
The Dry (2020)
Promising build-up ruined by weak plot twist
'The Dry' had the stage to tell a really difficult and important story in our society about gendered violence and it baulked and chose a limp red herring murder narrative.
For three quarters of the film I was compelled and drawn into the small town environment and the people within it. It was beautiful to see Victorian rivers, gums and dirt roads on the big screen. The settings of the carpet pub corridors, the rusted school fly-wire doors, cane chairs on the porch and yellow crockery behind glass cabinets all felt expressive and lived-in.
I felt the parallel narratives were nicely developing a ratcheting moral tension for Aaron; comparing his inability to accept that his friend Luke killed his family and the suggestion that for years he had lied about Luke's murder of their friend Ellie. These suggestions were drawn from the flashback narrative portraying the young Luke as acting callous and insensitive to Ellie (dunking under the water dangerously) and the guilt that Aaron expressed when the past incident was brought up.
I felt the funeral in the small town hall was an emotionally charged moment with the people having the difficulty of holding both a cruel murder and the loss of a liked community member, grief and judgment in the same space. At this point, I felt that Luke's mother Barb clearly demonstrated how the idea that there was an alternate killer was acting as a protection from the pain of having to consider Luke's culpability.
Murder-suicide family violence is a part of our culture that is very difficult to acknowledge and more common than we accept. The family man is the fulcrum of our domestic imagination and struggles to be outcast as immoral. This has been demonstrated repeatedly by the way these men are portrayed as 'good blokes' in the ensuing media coverage.
I felt that as Aaron's fixation on uncovering the investigation was building, and once the red herrings of various town secrets had been revealed as irrelevant, he would reach a moment of catharsis having to face what his friend had done and his complicity in protecting him from consequences of the murder of Ellie. As Luke's father suggests, if there had been accountability earlier, would Karen and Billie have had their lives taken from them. I felt that it would have been an interesting subverting of the righteous law-enforcer being shown to not be uncovering truth but to be losing his grip on what is right; his behavior becoming desperate as he manipulates the investigation and trespasses in Gretchen's house.
Instead, the narrative chose to completely extinguish the moral tension and create an insipid twist that places all the moral blame on a side character who was 'just trying to save his family'. This shift places Aaron's character into the easily digestible role of virtuous hero who is able to act assertively and literally 'save the town' from fire. In the neat wrap up, Aaron no longer has to contend with moral ambivalence and Luke's character dissolves into irrelevance.
It should be noted that Ellie's father Mal was revealed as being sexually abusive as well as being her murderer. This narrative arc was suggested earlier with some of Ellie's confusion with intimacy. During the film Mal was presented as a gnarled outsider and not given much on an internal narrative to allow space for the meaty moral greyness that I had hoped that Australian films would be interested in depicting.
I felt viscerally betrayed by what I thought was a weak decision to avoid sitting with the reality of male violence and how a friend processes their role in contributing to a lack of accountability. Given that the Dry was so beautifully made, I felt it was really disappointing that the depiction of gendered violence in a film which such popular reach was only used as a red herring for a lifeless plot twist. In some ways, by validating the disbelief at the existence of a father killing his wife and child, this film contributes to the very social collusion that it hinted it would rawly lay open with an unflinching gaze.