Before a global pandemic wrought devastation across the whole of the world, international attention was all on Australia, which went up like a tinderbox in their unusually hot 2019-2020 bushfire season. In a period known as the Black Summer, 18.6 million hectares went up in flame, killing dozens of people, destroying thousands of homes and businesses, and burning nearly three billion animals alive. It was an apocalyptic level of devastation that called to mind imagery of hellfire and damnation. Robert Connolly’s The Dry, a small town Australian murder mystery set in this period of immense drought, is about the devastation wrought by dried up land and dried up people.

Without regular precipitation, the lands surrounding Kiewarra have become susceptible to the smallest of sparks and without truth, the people of that small community have begun to dry up themselves, gnarling and turning on each other. Hope for better days has nowhere to take root and dies on the vine, carefree days of playing in watering holes and flirting with teenage girls long gone, with nothing but blood and regret to moisten the mood.

Enter Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), a pariah in his hometown community who’s gone on to become a renown Federal Agent. Returning home for the first time in two decades to attend the tragic funeral of his childhood best friend Luke, whom the police reports claim killed his wife Karen and son Billy before committing suicide, Aaron becomes entangled in a conspiratorial search for the truth. A truth that dredges up the mysterious death of their friend Ellie, who suspiciously drowned at 17 just before Aaron left forever. Are the deaths somehow connected and can Aaron prove his friend’s innocence – and, by proxy, his own – before the town’s people’s rage towards him boils over?

The kind of hoodwinking thriller where “everybody is the suspect”, Robert Connolly adapts the book of the same name from Jane Harper. A somber murder mystery characterized by its twisty reshuffling of prime suspects, The Dry is old-fashion slow-burn crime drama done right. Bana is solid in the pole position, a man haunted by the lies of his past, who’s probably gone into law enforcement to prove to himself that he is the upstanding man he hopes to be. Nonetheless, he remains a bit too straight-laced to really know, the script keeping Falk at arm’s length from front to back.

Those closest to Falk are just as suspect as lifelong enemies and the supporting cast is up to the task of playing whodunit hot potato. There’s Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly), another childhood friend and co-worker to the slain wife, with whom Falk shares a romantic entanglement; Greg Raco (Keir O’Donnell), a green local sergeant and first responder to the scene of the crime; Scott Whitlam (John Polson), Karen’s boss who is wrapped up in unsavory debts; and Grant Dow (Matt Nable), Ellie’s alcoholic brother who had already expressed interest in buying farmland from the now-murdered family.

The screenplay gets off shuffling the deck enough times to throw our suspect radar off the scent before ultimately arriving at a conclusion that’s conducive to the murder mystery aficionado seeking a tidy ending. When all is said and done, there’s not all that much to The Dry and little to suggest that it would get its hooks into those who don’t already consider themselves fans of the well-worn genre but as a well-acted addition to the somber detective drama, it works just fine.

CONCLUSION: A detective reckons with his past to sort out a murder-suicide involving his childhood best friend in this salty, straight-faced Australian thriller. Eric Bana is solid if unremarkable.