«Drowning Dry» Review: Time Slips, Memory Fails

Ernesta’s life, along with her family’s, seems peaceful enough. Her husband Lukas, an MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter, has just won a tournament. Bruised and sore, he joins Ernesta and their young son for a weekend at a quiet country house. Also along for the trip are Ernesta’s sister Juste, her husband, and their daughter. The first part of the film follows this tranquil retreat, where nothing particularly dramatic happens. What draws us in is not the story itself but the way Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareiša films these everyday moments: with long, static shots, little camera movement, and a patient attention to the mundane — the kind of small, unremarkable gestures many would dismiss as insignificant.

But about thirty minutes in, something shifts. Not only does the tone of the weekend change, but the very structure of the film breaks open. It’s as if a rupture in the story sparks a fracture in the storytelling itself. Without revealing too much, let’s just say there’s an accident by the river — a moment of shock that interrupts the calm. Yet rather than dwell on the event or its immediate consequences, Bareiša (whose Pilgrims won Venice’s Orizzonti section in 2021) jumps forward in time. What we find in this flash forward doesn’t quite align with what we’ve seen before. The people now absent — presumably dead — are not the ones we thought had been caught in the accident. How do these fragments connect? Can trauma distort memory? Or is time itself unreliable when the mind tries to process what’s too difficult to accept?

Drowning Dry will eventually circle back to the accident, but from a different angle. The narrative continues to pivot in time, gradually clarifying its purpose — one hinted at in the title, which could be taken to mean «drowning without water.» What matters here isn’t so much the event itself, but what it triggers. That sudden, destabilizing realization — that someone close can disappear in an instant — sets off a ripple effect. What follows is less a chain of dramatic consequences than a conceptual exploration of grief, memory, and dislocation.

From that central break onward, the film embraces a structure that feels both elliptical and elusive. It plays freely with time, withholding information, allowing space for confusion. Only toward the end do the narrative threads begin to cohere — though not fully, and not in a way that aims to neatly resolve the drama. The payoff may not be entirely satisfying in dramatic terms, but Bareiša shows a rare confidence in formal experimentation. Some of the most striking moments are scenes that would feel out of place in a conventional family drama, creating a deliberate tension between what’s being told and how it’s being told.

Part of that tension lies in the film’s use of silence and empty space. It lingers on “dead time” longer than most films would dare, and it stages emotionally fraught moments with a light, almost casual naturalism. Bareiša avoids melodrama, even when the subject matter could easily justify it. And then, unexpectedly, the film offers a few dance scenes — free, joyful, choreographed in the loose sense of simply letting people move. These moments are pure cinema. The sisters, dancing together, don’t yet know that this might be the last moment of peace they’ll share. That knowledge — or lack of it — gives those scenes a haunting beauty in retrospect. In an instant, everything that seemed normal can vanish.