Whether place in state forests, coastal communities or great, thirsty expanses of agricultural land, her four novels to date pick up on the duelling sensibilities of romanticism and awful that have recurred in australian storytelling since colonization. “ It ’ s quite easy for things to go improper quite cursorily, which is a real endowment for a writer. ” The Dry, which opens in film on Friday, follows off-duty australian federal patrol detective Aaron Falk ( Bana ), who is reluctantly dragged back to his fictional hometown of Kiewarra after his childhood friend is found shoot, dead along with their wife and son. The current case, and Falk ’ s presence in town, are complicated by his own significance in the death of another friend, Ellie ( BeBe Bettencourt ), decades earlier. Before making the film, Connolly hit the road with Bana so the pair could immerse themselves in the worldly concern of the book. “ You drive one, two, three hours out of Melbourne, and by the meter you cross four you ’ re into the Mallee region and the landscape changes vastly, ” Connolly says. “ I fell in sleep together with it ; it ’ s the most beautiful, extraordinary place. But it ’ sulfur ruffianly … you feel this brawny, tough life style of the landscape set against its beauty. ” In this tension, Harper ’ s characters inherit a settler narrative of pioneers carving hard-won homes and livelihoods from an often inhospitable, extraterrestrial being outback. It ’ second besides share of a nation-building mythology that helped launder the realities of eviction and environmental abasement on unceded state. ( The Dry ’ s floor of a complicate small-town return rings very differently to that of Wiradjuri author ’ s Tara June Winch ’ s The render ; in the film, a retire farmer, played by Bruce Spence, laments without irony how the automation of agriculture could all but clear the region of its people and communities – imagine that. ) Like the novel, the film ’ s slow-burning plat crackles with other twenty-first century pressures and anxieties that seem ripped directly from a Four Corners report. While the apparent murder-suicide that initially draws Falk back dwelling echoes all-too-common acts of male-perpetrated family violence, Harper ’ randomness books are besides peppered with corporate crime, revenge pornography, gambling addiction, crippling debt, preyed-upon backpackers and toxic maleness that sweats into hi-vis and private school uniforms alike. Onscreen, Connolly frames Harper ’ s characters like ants set against the enormousness of the landscape – and the scale of their problems. “ Something Eric and I talked a fortune about early on was not judging the characters that live in that world, ” says Connolly, who besides drew inspiration from Roman Polanski ’ s similarly water-driven whodunnit Chinatown. “ There ’ s a version of these stories that ’ s like Deliverance – ‘ urban quality gets stuck in dark, hideous regional place ’ – and that wasn ’ t our intention. We had to look deep into the kernel of these damaged characters and the baffling fortune they ’ ve had, and find the humanity. ”
‘ It ’ s the most beautiful, extraordinary place ’ : Rob Connolly and Eric Bana during the make of The Dry.
Photograph: Roadshow For Harper, that humanness was grounded in her 13 years as a mark journalist. “ It gave me a truly good ability to listen to people ’ mho stories and try to find a human component behind the headlines. ” inevitably, the greatest of the pressures facing these characters are drought and fuel, both worsened by a changing climate that, counter to the denial of federal ministers in Akubra-and-moleskin cosplay, is discernible on the nation. Like its beginning fresh, The Dry ties into a wave of recent local literature from Alice Bishop ’ s A Constant Hum to Jennifer Mills ’ Dyschronia that reflect upon the impact of ecological disaster on small communities. “ When I moved back to Australian in 2008 I got sent on a arouse safety course as a reporter, so I could be safe in the consequence that I would have to go out and cover a bushfire, ” Harper says. “ I was stunned by what I saw and learned – I ’ five hundred never seen that portrait of fire. How quickly it goes from OK to deadly in the space of minutes, that ’ s always stayed with me. ” Connolly says : “ The adult prototype of the film is Aaron standing in a river that ’ sulfur now completely dry and remembering himself 25 years ago, swimming with his friends. It ’ s kind of devastating imagination. “ Climate change and its impact on the nation were deliver with us all the time, ” he adds. “ We were filming out in a function of Australia that is doing it in truth hood. Beulah, the township [ on the bill poster ], has drink in water issues. It ’ south always portray. Farmers are growing unlike grains than they used to because there ’ south not enough water, they ’ re adjust. ”
Eric Bana and Miranda Tapsell in The Dry. Photograph: Roadshow much has changed since filming was completed in 2019. After the slaughter of last summer ’ sulfur bushfires, Australia is now entering a typically besotted ( if still record-breaking ) La Niña menstruation. worldwide protests have seen the very nature of the cop-centric crime play reappraised. And now The Dry hits cinema during a different kind of dry enchantment, as one of few modern releases on what is typically one of Hollywood ’ s biggest days of the class. “ We very tried to make this kind of, we call it, ‘ hyper-Australian ’ film, ” Connolly says. “ A big australian film : large landscapes, big stories, music, stars – one that brings australian audiences to the cinema to watch. ”
A year of lockdowns might besides grant the film an edge neither Harper or Connolly could have scripted : only in 2020 could 117 minutes of a maskless Eric Bana freely travelling around the victorian countryside besides qualify as escapist fantasy. The Dry is in film from 1 January
