Fragmented memory is a hallmark of traumatic experience, and Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareisa structures his oblique and haunting sophomore feature Drowning Dry accordingly. The unsettling drama, which premiered in the international competition of the Locarno Film Festival, is about a chain of calamitous events that derail a family’s sunny getaway weekend to the countryside, and indeed, their entire lives. Almost intentionally banal in its trappings of everyday domestic realism, the film resists easy sensationalism so much it would be inaccurate to label it a thriller, despite its suspenseful mystery and shocking tragedies. We slip back and forth in time between the lead-up and aftermath of a near-drowning and another connected accident, with information teased in a manner that leaves us profoundly disoriented and grappling to order these puzzle shards in our minds to ascertain exactly what has occurred within this family, how it all came to pass, and what has enabled them to keep going.
Drowning Dry is the follow-up to Bareisa’s similarly themed, and equally sparse and foreboding festival success Pilgrims (2021), which won the Orizzonti Award at the Venice Film Festival, and which sees those left behind after a gruesome crime revisit a town four years on, as they obsessively struggle to make sense of it. The title of Drowning Dry refers to the delayed onset of symptoms that can come after breathing in water, fitting for a film that is slow to take hold but stays under the skin. A deeply felt psychological reckoning with the cruelty of chance, which recolours the past and makes a mockery of future plans, it should enjoy wide festival play, consolidating Bareisa’s place as a distinctive new arthouse voice from the Baltic states.
Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite) is married to wiry, cocksure mixed martial arts fighter Lukas (Paulius Markevicius). The risk-taking aspect of his character, which drives him to court danger, has meant her love for him is mixed in with a high level of anxiety, whether watching him in the ring, or riding as a passenger as he overtakes other traffic in dicey highway situations. It is a trait that we know may foreshadow disaster, immediately setting us on edge, though the film will bend our nervous anticipation in unexpected directions. Ernesta and her sister Juste (Agne Kaktaite) co-own the home by the lake where they grew up, which they now use as a holiday house. It is the birthday weekend of Juste’s husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), and after Lukas triumphs in a tournament, the two couples together with their young children head to the countryside to celebrate. The setting is calm and idyllic, though indicators that the marriages are well past the first flushes of desire and on ground fraught with emotional tension abound. And they are an hour’s drive away from the nearest emergency room — a detail that orients us to expect the worst.
On the deck of the country house the sisters break into a synchronised dance routine to Donna Lewis’s 2008 pop hit about timeless dreaming “I Love You Always Forever,” which they presumably still know like the back of their hands from their youth. It’s a moment of joking around full of resonant nostalgia for an innocent past far from the mortgage obstacles they’ve been discussing over dinner, not yet knowing their concern with securing their future will soon prove drastically futile. As the unspeakable monster of premature mortality spreads its fingers around multiple accidents, injuries, violent reactions, death and collapse, and confusion spreads through the episodic scenes like noxious fumes, the inevitable fear of loss that comes with all significant bonds becomes an actuality. But so too, does the will to find a way to move forward, reconstitute a new understanding of reality, and rebuild human connections afresh.
Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer: Laurynas Bareisa
Cast: Gelmine Glemzaite, Agne Kaktaite, Giedrius Kiela, Paulius Markevicius
Producer: Klementina Remeikaite
Editing: Silvija Vilkaite
Production Design: Sigita Simkunaite
Production companies: Afterschool Production (Lithuania), Trickster Pictures (Latvia)
Sales: Alpha Violet
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In Lithuanian
88 minutes
