Engaging, yet baffling, contemporary drama Drowning Dry presents a non-linear portrait of two sisters, their marriage and children while depicting a family tragedy during a summer vacation. While the events unfold in a kaleidoscopic fashion, the narrative becomes quite clearer as the film ends. It’s the second feature from Lithuanian multi-hyphenate writer Lorinas Pareša, who won the 2021 Venice Horizons Prize for her debut feature Pilgrims, which features similarly fragmented storytelling.
Here, as his own DP, Parisa uses a closely monitored, spare shooting style that favors long, fixed-angle shots in which characters move in and out of the frame, as well as mirrored shots that disorient the viewer. The film won Parisa the Best Director award in Locarno and the Best Performance award for the group, and the film was later selected to represent Lithuania at the Academy Awards. Although it will not suit all tastes, audiences open to a different kind of world cinema that pays careful attention should find it a stimulating and imaginative work.
Attractive siblings Ernsta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) and Jost (Agnė Kaktaitė) have a close relationship. Meanwhile, the relationship between their husbands, Lukas (Gedrius Kela), a mixed martial arts competitor with a decent tattoo, and Tomas (Paulius Markievicius), a pompous, eccentric businessman with a powerful car, is competitive. One-upmanship that ultimately leads to a horrific disaster.
Ernsta and Lucas, who have much fewer financial resources than Joost and Thomas, want to sell the sisters’ holiday cottage (which the women inherited from their parents) in order to buy a place of their own, but Thomas is in no position to do so. He prefers to make condescending remarks about why he and Ghost are struggling because of his brother-in-law’s financial problems. Lucas later calmly scores points when the arrogant Thomas challenges him to a fight.
It’s clearly the energetic Ernesta and Jost who are doing most of the work in their marriage — and in their vacation home — as we see their men loitering or making inappropriate overtures to sex. Although the men manage to take the children, Lucas’s son Christopas (Hercus Scrapas) and Thomas’s daughter Orte (Olivia Eva Villon), swimming in the lake, they are not the most attentive parents, as a later rhyme scene makes clear. . However, it is Lucas who proves he has the most skills in emergency situations, something that boosts Thomas’ ego.
When the film first jumps forward in time, visually indicating the change in the sisters’ hairstyles and fashions, viewers may feel unsettled. But those who aren’t bothered by the move will become more involved in what’s (and isn’t) on screen as they try to piece together what happened.
In addition to their similarity in structure, “The Pilgrims” and “Dry Drowning” share, on a thematic level, the exploration of trauma, which Barisha investigates in unconventional ways that challenge and subvert dramatic traditions.
Kiela and Markevičius, who appeared in Pilgrims, are completely believable as the combative couples who each display a different style of masculinity. But the film truly belongs to Glemžaitė and Kaktaitė, whose unshakable bond withstands the rearrangement of their lives.