YNOT at the Movies

The Lithuanian writer-director Laurynas Bareiša's "Drowning Dry" (Seses | Lithuania/Latvia 2024 | in Lithuanian | 88 min.) is a precise, unsettling tale on trauma and memory, unfolding within the modest, familiar setting of a family weekend retreat. But beneath the surface of casual conversations lies a slowly fracturing emotional terrain, one shaped by the quiet horror of a near-tragedy and the dissonant aftershocks that follow.

What begins as a bucolic gathering—two sisters, Juste (Agne Kaktaite) and Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite), with their children and partners, celebrating a birthday and a sports victory—gently slips into something far more elusive. After a child nearly drowns, the narrative diverges, looping back on itself in formally inventive ways. This moment, though brief and without physical consequence, becomes a psychological fissure from which the film blooms.

Drawing from the medical concept of "dry drowning," where the body appears unharmed but later succumbs to internal distress, Bareiša crafts a structure built on delayed reaction and mirrored repetition. Scenes recur, subtly altered. A conversation revisits itself. A song plays again, but it's not quite the same. These repeated moments aren't used for dramatic effect, but to show how trauma can replay in your mind. It doesn't try to scare you with sudden moments, but instead makes you feel uneasy by repeating things in a way that feels strangely familiar, like you've seen them before even if you haven't.

The film's ensemble maintains a naturalistic tone, allowing emotion to flicker beneath the surface without theatrical display. The minimalism is purposeful, channeling the characters' inner fragmentation through quiet gestures and pauses rather than overt expression.

"Drowning Dry" withholds clarity, not out of coyness, but because trauma rarely follows a neat narrative arc. The story ends not with catharsis but with a tableau: a rotten feast and a smashed car, a pair of garbage heaps mirroring each other. One is cleaned. The other is not. Closure, Bareiša suggests, is unevenly distributed.

This is a film that demands patience and close attention. Its fragmented chronology and repetition-based structure may prove disorienting or even frustrating to viewers expecting conventional storytelling. Yet for those attuned to its quiet rhythms, this film offers a devastatingly nuanced reflection on how trauma embeds itself in the everyday.

A formally rigorous and emotionally resonant work, this film confirms Laurynas Bareiša as one of the most interesting European directors exploring the unseen contours of grief and healing. Like the condition that lends the film its name, the devastation here is delayed, internal, and chilling in its quiet persistence.

"Drowning Dry" opens in theaters on Friday, July 18, 2025.