Eric Bana in Australian Thriller

Australian writer-director Robert Connolly had a home hit in 2021 with The Dry, a slow-burn homicide thriller constructed round Eric Bana’s somber efficiency as a pensive metropolis cop drawn again to the distant city of his childhood in the course of a chronic drought. Bana returns as Aaron Falk in Power of Nature: The Dry 2, which is in any other case a sequel in identify alone. The setting this time is a lush and really moist mountain rainforest, drenched by a large thunderstorm at a key level within the narrative. That makes half the title a whole misnomer.

It is a handsomely produced, solidly acted thriller that’s definitely watchable, although the perplexing subtitle just isn’t its solely difficulty. In contrast to its riveting predecessor, it’s absorbing however by no means fairly gripping.

Connolly sticks to novelist Jane Harper’s template from the primary e book in her Aaron Falk trilogy, by which the Australian Federal Police detective’s investigation stirs up recollections of the tragic demise of a good friend from his youth, which left behind unanswered questions. However this time, the detours right into a traumatic expertise from Falk’s childhood — a thread not current within the supply novel — are an inorganic distraction that slows all the things down and makes an already introspective protagonist much more closed-off.

Tales of lacking individuals or deaths set in opposition to a pure world each lovely and threatening that retains its secrets and techniques are a frequent theme of Australian cinema going again a minimum of so far as Picnic at Hanging Rock. Connolly successfully faucets into the maintain on the creativeness of such mysteries together with his set-up right here.

A gaggle of 5 ladies on a company mountain climbing retreat set off via a rainforest within the Victorian mountain ranges however solely 4 of them return, and nobody can appear to pinpoint precisely when the fifth member of the occasion went lacking. What was deliberate as a team-building train as a substitute deepens the schisms among the many co-workers at a monetary funding firm.

Whereas the case would ordinarily be strictly a neighborhood search and rescue police operation, the identification of the lacking girl, Alice (Anna Torv), brings Melbourne detective Falk and his investigative companion Carmen (Jacqueline McKenzie, wasted in a nothing function) to the scene. It’s revealed early on that Alice is a whistleblower, leveraged by the Feds into feeding them data to construct a company malfeasance case in opposition to the corporate run by smug enterprise kingpin Daniel Bailey (Richard Roxburgh).

Glimpses into that investigation and the seek for Alice are intercut with an intensive account of the ladies’s time within the wilderness, which is essentially the most compelling a part of Power of Nature. The group is led by Daniel’s tough-cookie spouse Jill (Deborra-Lee Furness); it additionally consists of sisters Beth (Sisi Stringer) and Bree (Lucy Ansell) and younger mom Lauren (Robin McLeavy).

It seems that each one of them have had friction with Alice, an abrasive colleague who doesn’t make investments a lot in making mates. And the one factor Beth, Bree and Lauren can agree on is that the dynamic modified abruptly on their first evening within the rainforest when Daniel broke off from the separate males’s group to affix them, whisking Alice off among the many ferns for a non-public phrase.

The regular deterioration of their rapport as they discover themselves far off the trail with out a map gives robust materials notably for Torv, who makes Alice fearful, however nonetheless cagey, defensive and blunt; and Furness, whose spiky, good-humored Jill wouldn’t be simply intimidated even when she weren’t one of many firm heads. Their nerves are additional jangled by the specter of a serial killer primarily based within the space 40 years earlier, a few of whose victims have been by no means discovered.

Standing in for the fictional Giralang Ranges are magnificent Victorian areas in Nice Otway Nationwide Park, the Dandenong Ranges and the Yarra Valley. Cinematographer Andrew Commis takes full benefit of all of the pure splendor, from the spectacular waterfall that marks the beginning of the ladies’s hike to the rising claustrophobia of the dense foliage and its cover as their plight turns into extra determined. Peter Raeburn’s ominous rating enhances the moody undertones.

What weighs the movie down is that whereas assembling new components of the puzzle and wrestling with guilt over the stress he positioned on Alice and the way that may have endangered her, Aaron retains retreating in his thoughts to a household mountain climbing journey when he was a preteen boy (performed by Archie Thomson).

Previous and current folded collectively seamlessly in The Dry, echoing throughout the many years. Because the younger Aaron and his father (Jeremy Lindsey Taylor, the opposite holdover from the sooner movie) turn out to be separated from the boy’s mom (Ash Ricardo), a frantic search ensues. However quite than including complexity to the drama, these recollections give the mainframe narrative a halting rhythm that lessens the suspense. In addition they make you surprise if this cop ever will get a case that doesn’t reopen outdated wounds.