Federal agent Aaron Falk hasn't set foot in his drought-cracked hometown in decades, and The Dry, Robert Connolly's 2021 Australian mystery, wastes no time explaining why. A funeral pulls him back, and the town's memory of him turns out to be a lot longer than he'd like.
What is The Dry about?
Falk returns home to bury a childhood friend, caught up in what looks like a murder-suicide, and finds a town still nursing an old grudge against him from years earlier, tied to the unresolved death of a teenage girl. As he starts asking questions about his friend's final days, old suspicions resurface alongside new evidence, and the film moves between the present investigation and flashbacks that slowly fill in what really happened back then. Eric Bana plays Falk as guarded and watchful, a man who left this place for good reason and now has to work it anyway. The drought itself becomes part of the atmosphere, cracked earth and dead grass framing a community running short on patience with outsiders and old wounds alike.
About the cast
Eric Bana carries the film as Aaron Falk, playing him with a stillness that suits a man used to being watched with suspicion. Genevieve O'Reilly plays a local who still believes in his innocence, and Keir O'Donnell appears as the town's police sergeant, working the current case alongside Falk. The ensemble around them fills in a small-town cast that mostly seems glad Falk left and unsettled that he's back.
Context & significance
Robert Connolly adapted the film from Jane Harper's best-selling novel, filming in rural Victoria during an actual, severe drought that gives the landscape a lot of its bite. The film became one of the highest-grossing Australian releases of its year on the strength of that source material and a slow-burn approach that trusts the mystery to unfold at its own pace.
Watching The Dry on Ktime
The Dry is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, letting Farsi-speaking audiences follow the film's dual timeline without losing track of either thread. Reading the page costs nothing; watching only requires a free K-Time account, part of a catalogue built with the Farsi-speaking diaspora in mind.