Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

The Dry 2 squanders the two things the original The Dry had going for it: its strong evocation of small-town Australia - so real - and Eric Bana's likeable Falk, tied to that place through his past but now a fish-out-of-water city slicker - but here, the setting is a fictional rainforest (the Dandenong, Yarra, and Otway Ranges standing in for the - for some reason fictional - Giraling Ranges) and Falk has been reduced to a generic interrogator of one suspect after another - and in a particularly uninteresting mystery - the disappearance of a woman from the world's dreariest company retreat where five or six women snap at each other about too many plot points all out of scope of their miserable forest prison: peripheral corporate skullduggery, references to bullying, allusions to the wayward pasts of two young sisters, ultimately unnecessary harkbacks to a serial killer case, and Falk's unilluminating backstory - a feeble attempt at grounding him once more in place through his mother's weird disappearance years and years earlier. 

 

★★☆☆☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) ('Village of Eight Graves') (1977)

Author Seishi Yokomizo's convoluted mystery has thankfully been trimmed of several characters and the action streamlined in this ripper adaptation of his book, which connects sixteenth-century feudal events in Japan to a modern-day Japanese murder mystery in the village of Yatsuhakamura (Village of Eight Graves) and, though a mystery, it enthusiastically embraces horror — the body count is exorbitant, there's a chilling link to the real-life 1938 Tsuyama incident, and scenes of maniacal villains chasing victims through labyrinthine limestone caves amid ghastly 70s giallo stylings.

★★★★☆

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Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)

In this D-grade To Kill A Mockingbird that takes Harper Lee's Southern Gothicism and replaces it with Hallmark schmaltz, a patently absurd Boo Radley archetype — a "Marsh Girl" ostracized by townsfolk despite being polite, independent, self-sufficient, strong, well-groomed, self-educated, and someone who easily attracts a spunky local boyfriend not once but twice, and who sets herself up as a mussel-monger and later as a book illustrator by communicating winningly with local shop owners and uppity city book publishers — is made a cause célèbre when she contrives a way to have her abusive boyfriend drop sixty-five feet from a firetower.

★☆☆☆☆

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Clue: The Movie (1985)

The actors are about as animated and have as much personality as the boardgame's character cards and it disconcerts that they are not the colours they are supposed to be — Mrs Peacock has feathers but is brown and Mrs White isn't the cook but a black-clad Goth — and the stage sets very wearily, like at the start of a board game when noone is sure of the rules, but stick with the carry-on because there are some laughs to be had towards the end as the initially easily shocked troupe grows increasingly unfazed by all the murders happening around them while Tim Curry grows increasingly irreverent as Wadsworth the butler of the Cluedo mansion.

★★☆☆☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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The Dry (2021)

The leads in this mystery - Eric Bana, Genevieve O'Reilly, and Matthew Nable - are terrific, as is the evocation of drought-stricken rural AustralIa (with scenes making me audibly gasp as they transported me back to the local pub, shop, dry creekbed, the local copper, and the locals of my Australian country-town upbringing) but I've read Jane Harper's The Lost Man and now I've seen The Dry and what doesn't rise up to the level of the actors and the photography is Harper's mystery, because like the plot of The Lost Man, this movie's mystery ends with a shrug, like you didn't realise you were just watching an episode of Cop Shop because it was dressed up like Picnic At Hanging Rock.

★★★☆☆

Strangerland (2015)

Miranda and her friends similarly dreamily wandered off into an Australian landscape and vanished but this movie is far less captivating than that, clearly trying but failing at being a new enduring Australian bush mystery of the mystic Picnic at Hanging Rock variety but also failing in its attempts at gritty Australian neo-noir realism of the, say, Mystery Road variety, because although Nicole Kidman is captivating, nothing else is remotely interesting in this dreary, unrewarding story of a promiscuous teen and her brother who are removed from the face of the red Australian earth by a duststorm.

★★☆☆☆

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Personal Shopper (2016)

The viewers most likely to get something out of this monotonous ghost story slash new-gen existential drama with fleeting murder mystery are teen Twilight fans, slightly older now than they were when Kristen Stewart was romanced by vampires and werewolves but still sporting their multimedia-enhanced attention-spans that enable them to deal with Personal Shopper's flux of unfinished ideas, and who, like the main character, experience a lot of the world alone with eyes trained on a screen, expressing their emotions primarily via emoticons - "I'm scared," "I'm ashamed," Maureen (Kristen Stewart's anachronistically-named psychic personal-shopper) punches into her phone during a text exchange that makes up a boring bulk of the film (an exchange she has with a ghost or a murderer or herself or someone else...stop asking questions) but despite these texted e-motions, Maureen never looks scared nor ashamed nor anything else: her scowl and low affect go unchanged for the duration of the movie - she is neither happy nor sad, here nor there; she is always in transit, between worlds, like the twenty-somethings who might, like, deign to hit LIKE on social media in response to all this more-mature-Twilight supernatural angst.

★☆☆☆☆

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Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher gives the real-life Son of Sam killings the Bong Joon-Ho Memories of Murder treatment, creating an intriguing police procedural about a cartoonist whose life becomes consumed by the investigation that spanned parts of the 60s, the 70s and 80s but remains unsolved today.

★★★★☆

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The Monitor (Babycall) (2011)

It disappoints ultimately in the way mystery thrillers with a delusional main character always do - your questions can't be answered because no information can be relied upon, and just how is she experiencing the cold and wet of a non-existent lake? - but this is suspenseful most of the way with Noomi Rapace playing a traumatised mother living in fear with her son.

★★★☆☆

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Stranger by the Lake (L'Inconnu Du Lac) (2013)

A plodding, unconvincing police investigation headed by the film world's most uncharismatic police inspector is the context for three or four explicit gay sex scenes and the film's one belaboured point about one gay man's destructive lust.

★★☆☆☆ 

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