It’s hard to beat a gritty Australian thriller, especially one set in a dusty desolate country town where you don’t exactly know who is the villain. Aaron (Eric Bana) is a federal cop living in the city, he’s haunted by the death of a teenage girl decades earlier in the country town he grew up in.  The girl was someone he loved.

He has to go back to the country to attend a funeral, but drought has ravaged the town he grew up in and not only is the land a tinderbox waiting to ignite, so are the townspeople, especially when Aaron comes back and old hatred is stirred up.

He gets a room in the local pub and has flashbacks to when his teenage love died. The funeral he attends becomes a whodunit and with the local rookie cop he has to work out if the two decades apart events are connected.

These haunted memories work well in only giving snippets to keep you guessing as to who is the real murderer with slow reveals. It’s well done by Director Robert Connolly, as is the cinematography with aerial shots of barren farmland, which adds to the loneliness, and despair of the story.

Eric Bana is great here, he plays Aaron as a sympathetic character tormented by the past and you’re never quite sure how dirty he actually is. ‘The Dry’ is Aussie cinema at it’s best, the kind of movies that should get made more often, I highly recommend it.

hallymustang rating : 4/5 📽📽📽📽