Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Eric Bana, Jacqueline McKenzie, Anna Torv, Deborra-lee Furness, Robin McLeavy, Richard Roxburgh, Tony Briggs, Sissy Stringer
Intro:
… both overcomplicated and as shallow as a rain puddle.
The Dry was a runaway success at the box office, and a much-needed one for Australian film. It was a rudimentary whodunit elevated by amazing presentation and a real sense of place within the narrative. And now that its follow-up is finally seeing release, after being held up as a result of the SAG-AFTRA strike, there’s a good chance it could follow suit and bring more shine to Aussie cinema.
In terms of presentation, this certainly matches The Dry and even the lukewarm Blueback in showing director Robert Connolly excelling at using the environment as storytelling texture. Trading in the scorched wildfire-in-waiting of Kiewarra for the isolating downpour of the Giralang mountain ranges, Connolly and DP Andrew Commis present the wilderness as harsh as dryland, but now an enveloping force that can swallow a person whole if they aren’t careful. It’s like a cross between the tense ambiguity of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the madness-by-a-thousand-drips of Venus as envisioned by Ray Bradbury in The Long Rain; a moody and intimidating backdrop for Eric Bana’s Aaron Falk to solve another murky murder mystery.
Shame that the mystery itself is such a damp squib. Whodunits like this rely on compelling and (hopefully) complex characters, making the cyclical return to them to tease out more details of what really happened, which isn’t really the case here. As we incrementally discover more about where informant Alice (Anna Torv) went in the middle of a corporate wilderness retreat, the suspects all appear to have combativeness as their sole character trait, with no-one managing to bring much life to the bickering. Hell, it manages to go one worse and make Alice come across so standoffish that the care factor is limp at best.
It doesn’t help that the narrative structure is both overcomplicated and as shallow as a rain puddle. Throughout, Alexandre De Franceschi and Mari Papoutsis’ editing intercuts three plot threads: Falk and the insultingly underutilised Jacqueline McKenzie as his partner Carmen trying to solve the mystery after the fact, Alice and her hiking group getting lost and creating the mystery, and Falk as a child hiking in the same area with his parents. They all operate as mild variations on an underdeveloped theme: how easy it is to lose yourself in a place like this. However, none of the story-strands are able to deliver the tidal wave of dread that the atmosphere initially promises. To say nothing of the corporate espionage that instigates this whole thing which – as fired-up as Falk gets about it at times (offering desperately-needed energy to the production in the process) – is little more than pretence for the already-thin plot to occur at all.
Force Of Nature: The Dry 2 is so underwhelming, it could more accurately be titled ‘Gentle Suggestion of Nature’. On its own, it’s merely ignorable and could make for decent ‘Rainfall ASMR To Fall Asleep To’ material when it lands on streaming. But at a time when whodunit cinema on the world stage is populated by the fun revivalism of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot films, the elaborate Anatomy of a Fall, and the wicked-clever revisionism of Knives Out, its middling quality sticks out that much more.
