Critics reviews

While little here eschews genre conventions, Bana’s weathered performance and striking work by DoP Stefan Duscio ensure that this is a gripping-enough watch, even as it ticks a torrent of familiar boxes.

Bana anchors the smartly written drama wonderfully well. Imbuing his steely, no-nonsense character with just the right amount of insecurity and introspection, [he] ensures that audiences will be glued to everything Aaron Falk does and says.

Connolly teases out the revelations at a steady, sweaty pace that’s gripping, only to rush the ending. But Bana’s taut lead performance is an apt match for the film’s haunted spirit. Forbidding visuals like vast, weather-worn boulders split in two by mighty gum trees grant this dark tale just enough Australian gothic to conjure up the ghost of "Picnic at Hanging Rock."

Director Robert Connolly’s adaptation is a very gripping and polished film, commandingly performed and directed, with an airtight sense of tonal cohesiveness... he film remains rock solid throughout: taut, tough and tense, matching wide-open spaces with uncomfortably close drama.

There’s just enough mystery and intrigue lingering at every begrimed frame of "The Dry" to keep the audience invested as its parallel secrets slowly unspool, but this modest, seemingly scattered affair never quite rises above its television aesthetics and lack of formal ambition.

While the film is well crafted, it’s unfancy in a way that feels televisual rather than cinematic – as laconic and pragmatic as its characters. "The Dry" frustrated me because it felt like an each-way bet: it has a go at both moody psychodrama and mystery narrative, but not emphatically enough to really satisfy on either ground.