‘Drowning Dry’ Review: Subtle Lithuanian Drama Depicts a Family Tragedy Across Fragmented Time and Points of View

Engaging, yet tantalizingly withholding, the contemporary drama “Drowning Dry” offers a nonlinear portrait of two sisters, their marriages and children while depicting a family tragedy during a summer holiday. As it unfolds in a kaleidoscopic manner, the narrative snaps into sharpest focus just as the film ends. It’s the sophomore feature of Lithuanian multi-hyphenate Laurynas Bareiša, who claimed the 2021 Venice Horizons prize for his feature debut “Pilgrims,” which boasts similarly fragmented storytelling.

Here serving as his own DP, Bareiša employs a spare, closely observed shooting style that favors fixed-angle long takes in which the characters bustle in and out of the frame, as well as shots with mirrors that disorient the viewer. Winner of the best director prize for Bareiša in Locarno and a best performance award for the ensemble, the film was subsequently selected to represent Lithuania at the Academy Awards. Although it won’t be to all tastes, audiences open to a different sort of world cinema that repays careful attention should find it a stimulating and imaginative work.

Attractive 30-something siblings Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) and Juste (Agnė Kaktaitė) enjoy a close bond. Meanwhile, the relationship of their respective husbands, Lukas (Giedrius Kiela), a fit, tattooed mixed martial arts competitor, and Tomas (Paulius Markevičius), a pompous, out-of-shape businessman with a powerful car, is marked by a competitive one-upmanship that ultimately leads to a shocking calamity.

Ernesta and Lukas, whose finances are considerably tighter than those of Juste and Tomas, would like to sell the sisters’ countryside holiday home (which the women inherited from their parents) in order to purchase a place of their own, but Tomas is not in favor and makes condescending remarks about why he and Juste should have to suffer because of the in-law’s money problems. Lukas later calmly scores points when the arrogant Tomas challenges him to spar.

Clearly, it’s the energetic Ernesta and Juste who do most of the work in their marriages — and at the vacation home — as we see their men folk lounging around or making inopportune overtures for sex. Although the guys manage to take the kids, Lukas’s son Kristupas (Herkus Scrapas) and Tomas’s daughter Urté (Olivija Eva Vilune), to swim in the lake, they aren’t the most observant of parents, as a rhyming scene makes clear later on. Yet it is Lukas who proves to have the most skills in an emergency situation, something that further deflates Tomas’s ego.

When the film first jumps forward in time, visually signified by a change in the sisters’ hairstyles and costumes, viewers may feel destabilized. But those who aren’t turned off by the move will become even more involved in what is (and is not) shown on screen as they try to piece together what has happened.

As well as being similar in structure, “Pilgrims” and “Drowning Dry” share, on a thematic level, an exploration of trauma, which Bareiša investigates in unconventional ways that defy and subvert dramatic conventions.

Kiela and Markevičius, who both appeared in “Pilgrims” are completely credible as the combative husbands who each evince a different style of manhood. But the film really belongs to Glemžaitė and Kaktaitė, whose unwavering bond withstands a reordering of their lives.