Let’s just get this out of the way. It is extremely funny that a film with the The Dry 2 in its title takes place in a damp forest, one where the threat of a storm is integral to its plot. Robert Connolly, the writer and director of Force of Nature: The Dry 2, wants to piggyback on the success of his sleeper 2020 hit, a smart thriller that was a smash in Australia. Indeed, Eric Bana returns as Aaron Falk, a melancholy federal agent whose investigation has a way of dovetailing with his personal life. Like the 2020 film, this is a adaptation of a Jane Harper novel. The difference here is there no required knowledge of the first entry, just like how the thrillers Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider feature the same protagonist across different mysteries. But once you get past the cumbersome title, Force of Nature is an absorbing thriller, one that juggles multiple plots so we never quite know who to trust, even when we are certain who is lying.
There are three separate timelines in Force of Nature, and within those there are layers of confusion because the flashbacks contain half-truths or lies by omission. In the present, Aaron and his partner Carmen (Jacqueline McKenzie) lead a missing person investigation in a dense forest. Normally, this would be a normal search and rescue mission conducted by park police, but the missing person is Alice (Anna Torv), a white-collar criminal who is the whistleblower in an investigation Aaron leads against Alice’s employer. He is her handler, and without her, his case falls apart. Why is she in the forest? Alice must keep appearances in a corporate retreat where she and her colleagues, all women, must trek through the forest. Things went bad along the way, to say nothing of an encroaching storm serving as a ticking clock. We follow Aaron’s attempt to recreate what happened, while we see flashbacks to how Alice’s hike went awry. Amidst all this, there is another flashback where we see a young family trek through the same woods, and only slowly do we understand that connection to the present.
It is to Connolly’s credit that his film never gets too confusing. Luckily, Bana’s performance as Aaron is right for the material. He approaches the job with weariness, and his deliberate style means we are able to follow his thinking more clearly. If the scenes with Bana are slow, then the flashbacks with Torv are a necessary contrast. Parts of Force of Nature unfold like a survival thriller, and Connolly shoots the forest in a way that helps understand why something so beautiful can also be so intimidating. Torv’s performance adds to that anxiety. She is no shrinking violet, but a smart, no-nonsense woman who is so forceful that everyone in the film hates her. Only Aaron somewhat understands what she is thinking, and even then he misses a lot because his job – as Carmen likes to remind him – is to push her because she is an asset, not a colleague. Someone can resist that kind of pressure for only so long, and the tension in Force of Nature can be found in how Alice finally succumbs to it.
Despite a strong central narrative, there is a lot that bogs down Force of Nature. There are already so many narrative threads to resolve, then Conolly compounds them with superfluous subplots, like the truth of whether Alice’s daughter is a bully or the particulars of a spider bite. Many of these subplots are red herrings, the kind of thing that add color to a mystery novel but distract from a film adaptation. The bigger problem, one that nearly undoes the film, is how Connolly handles all these revelations. There are few thrills in the whodunit, to the point where the big twists are more depressing than revelatory. Maybe it would help to include some voice over, since the actors can only communicate so much and an author is free to explore character interiority in a way that a filmmaker is not. Pervasive gloom can only add so much atmosphere, and at a certain point it can veer into self-parody. Force of Nature nearly gets into that territory, and yet Alice’s story – complicated by her obstinate nature – make us curious whether she can hang on long enough so that Aaron can get his man.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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