Movie Review: Drowning Dry

Life is dangerously unpredictable. We can be happily (or at least contentedly) going through our days feeling perfectly safe, when suddenly tragedy can strike and change everything forever. It’s a major theme of Lithuanian filmmaker Laurynas Bareiša’s sophomore feature, along with the ways that we cope after said tragedies have occurred, both of which he handles well, if perhaps a little too sedately for my taste.

Sisters Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) and Justė (Agnė Kaktaitė) are vacationing with their spouses Tomas (Giedrius Kiela) and Lukas (Paulius Markevičius) and their two young children at the lake house they inherited from their parents. Lukas is a successful martial arts fighter and in very good shape, which drives a quietly seething jealousy in the comparatively “average” Tomas that in turn causes him to sometimes act out to try and prove his masculinity.

One day while the group is goofing off in the lake, disaster nearly strikes in the form of a parent’s worst nightmare, only narrowly averted by Lukas at the last minute, and undoubtedly further fueling Tomas’ simmering resentment. Though the movie doesn’t explicitly spell out the cause of the immediate aftermath, those feelings very likely contribute to the even greater tragedy that follows.

Bareiša’s camera lingers in artfully framed, static shots that capture the two families engaging in relatively mundane activities. Through their strong performances, the four leads convey much about their characters’ thoughts and feelings regarding themselves and each other, helping the viewer to fill in the gaps that the screenplay explicitly avoids. That said, there are several scenes that seem to stretch on too long, testing the audience’s patience and making the relatively short 88-minute runtime feel much longer.

About a third of the way through the movie begins to flash forward and backward between their vacation as it works its way towards its inevitable catastrophe and various points in the future to observe the ways that the characters are able to move on in its aftermath. This narrative choice makes things a bit more interesting, as it forces us to try to piece together exactly what has happened while it slowly doles out information, but even still, the pace remains relatively glacial.

There is a lot to like here, and Drowning Dry will leave patient viewers with much to think over, but the story is so sedate that it begins to feel like it’s been unnecessarily padded out to feature length and would have perhaps worked better as a short film. Bareiša is certainly a filmmaker to watch with a keen eye for both human nature and evocative scenery, and with a little more narrative refinement I could see him producing a masterpiece, but despite some moments of brilliance, this is more “good” than “great.” ★★★