The Dry (2019)

 

Aaron Falk is an Australian Federal Police investigator, specialising in financial crime.  He lives in Melbourne, but the funeral of his childhood friend Luke Hadler brings him back to Kiewarra, the small rural town in which he grew up.

Luke's funeral is a difficult occasion for the town; it appears he killed his wife Karen and their son Billy before taking his own life, leaving only the infant daughter, still in the crib, alive.  Even under better circumstances, however, Falk's return to town would have been a reluctant one: he left twenty years earlier to escape harassment when he was suspected in the death of his girlfriend Ellie.

But when Luke's parents ask Falk to stay and investigate the crime, he reluctantly agrees.  This naturally makes many of the locals angry, particularly Ellie's father Mal and her brother Grant who brand Falk a liar and a murderer.

Is Luke's death the murder-suicide it appears to be?  Is the man investigating it himself a murderer?  You will of course need to see the movie to find out.

Or you could read the book on which it is based.  Released in 2016, Jane Harper's The Dry is an internationally award-winning mystery novel.  As you might imagine from that, it's a very good read indeed.

And to be completely fair, the film version of the tale is a solid movie with a good cast.  The problem for me, as someone who has read the novel, is that it's a bit too faithful.  I know some people hate it when films change things form the book, but I'm firmly of the opinion that different forms of media have different needs, and this adaptation basically hews as close to the book as it can, and therefore felt a little bit stale to me.

Obviously, if you haven't read the book, you won't have that issue.  And it is a decent film.  If this is a genre you like, and you either haven't read the book or don't care that there will be literally no surprises here, than you'll probably like this.