Dry Fidelity
A faithful and efficient adaptation of the popular crime novel by Jane Harper, Robert Connolly’s film was the local cinematic success story of early 2021. But considered in the context of recent Australian genre works that have capably straddled the increasingly blurred divide between big and small screen, the film is disappointingly lacking in some essential cinematic qualities, Mel Campbell argues.
Jane Harper’s debut novel The Dry was optioned for the screen before it was even published.1 Set in the fictional drought-stricken rural community of Kiewarra, where the sun beats down relentlessly on buried secrets, the novel tells a gripping mystery story that foregrounds mood and setting in a way that reads like a screen treatment.
But would it be a big- or small-screen story? The obvious choice would have been television, where many adaptations of crime novels have found a home. As journalist Linda Morris observed in 2018, ‘New streaming services have ratcheted up demand for compelling long-form content – and crime fiction, with its complex and suspenseful plotlines, offers hugely saleable products with a ready-made audience.’2
Ultimately, The Dry became a 2021 feature film directed by Robert Connolly. Producer Jodi Matterson told Screen Australia:
It’s really the filmmakers and the material that drives us more than saying, ‘oh, we’ve got a slot, we need to be making two TV shows now and we need to make one film now’. It’s much more emotional than that. We find a book that we all fall in love with and then we go into developing that and things happen on their own timeline.3
What struck me most about The Dry, having enjoyed its source novel,
