In 2020, The Dry was a massive box office success story for Australia, especially at the peak of COVID-19 cinema. Now, both director Robert Connolly and star Eric Bana have returned for the second story in Jane Harpers Aaron Falk novels. This time, swapping the drought-stricken Victorian small town with a cold case and a connection to Faulk’s past for a missing woman in a Victorian National Park who has information Faulk needs for his current case.
Force of Nature: The Dry 2 is a ridiculously stupid title. You don’t need to have seen the first film to watch this one; there’s no mention of the events of The Dry, although you may get more out of the continuing slow-burn backstory of Falk if you have. Unlike The Dry, this film features Falk working with another detective, Carmen (a fantastic and under-utilized Jacqueline McKenzie), to gather evidence against a tech company doing lots of bad things with its money. Alice Russell (Anna Torv) is the inside woman Falk and Carmen have been talking to and using to gather evidence. So when she disappears, and only four other women come out of a weekend team-building exercise on a hiking retreat, everyone begins questioning what could have happened.
The Dry used a relatively straightforward cold case formula and interchanged past and present periods. Where Force of Nature falters instantly is the dizzying amount of jumping around the film has you keeping up with. There’s the present time looking for Alice, the flashbacks to the journey through the trail with Alice, the sideways jump to Falk talking to Alice in Melbourne, and then there are flashbacks to when Falk was a kid and his mother got lost on this same trail. It gives the film’s stars no chance to build character, nor Force of Nature, anytime to introduce anywhere near as likable characters as seen in The Dry, like Genevieve O’Reilly as Gretchen or BeBe Bettencourt as Ellie in the flashback.
This is also a case where the book works better, and the film has done an average job at making an adaptation for film. The claustrophobic tension and sense that anything and anyone could be out there with the women is gone. The “force” of nature isn’t felt. The cast of characters are also super-unlikable. Where Alice is meant to butt heads, here she is standoffish to the point of no return. The other woman, aside from Deborra-Lee Furness as the head of the group, Jill Bailey, is equally as unlikable.
Robert Connolly has re-teamed with his Blueback photographer, Andrew Commis, who gives the Victorian government more than its money’s worth for free tourism photography. Sure, there’s a lost woman out there, and someone got bit by a deadly spider, but damn if I don’t want to visit this place.
