In Drowning Dry, Laurynas Bareisa invites audiences into a cinematic space where time bends, memories shift, and sorrow seeps through the cracks like water that refuses to evaporate. This is not a conventional drama, nor is it a puzzle box film that begs to be solved. It is, instead, a disquieting experience—unnerving not because of jump scares or explosive revelations, but because of its commitment to portraying the ineffable weight of grief, confusion, and emotional paralysis.
From its very first scenes, Drowning Dry sets itself apart from the traditional storytelling rhythm. The film opens on a muted, seemingly mundane note: two couples arriving at a country house for a weekend getaway. There is no exposition, no explicit framing of who these people are or why they’ve gathered. Instead, Bareisa places the camera at a distance, watching the families unload cars packed with bags, toys, and supplies. They make several trips, chatting in fragments, but the dialogue is not the focus here. There’s no critical information being exchanged. What commands attention is the camera itself—how it moves, or more precisely, how it barely moves at all.
In this scene, the camera slowly, almost imperceptibly, zooms in. It’s a creeping, glacial move that tightens the emotional grip on the viewer without them even realizing it. Nothing happens in this moment, and yet everything happens. The slow zoom becomes an event in itself, quietly indicating that all is not well. Something about the scene feels off—though it’s hard to say exactly what. This subtle disorientation is Bareisa’s signature, a foreshadowing of what’s to come.
Bareisa is not new to cinematic visual language. Before directing his own features, he spent years behind the camera as a cinematographer. That experience is palpable in every frame of Drowning Dry, which he also shot himself. Each composition is deliberate, spare, and quietly expressive. He avoids the typical cinematic grammar—there are few close-ups, no insert shots to clue us into important objects or gestures, and no obvious narrative cues. The story, elliptical and emotionally loaded, unfolds largely through visual repetition, spatial manipulation, and a keen sense of rhythm.
While the English title of the film is Drowning Dry, the original Lithuanian title is Sesės, meaning “Sisters.” And indeed, at the heart of the film are two siblings: Ernesta, played by Gelmine Glemzaite, and Juste, portrayed by Agne Kaktaite. They’ve arrived at the country house with their husbands and young children for what is supposed to be a relaxing holiday. Ernesta’s husband, Lukas (Paulius Markevicius), is an MMA fighter whose violent profession is immediately foregrounded in the film’s brutal opening scene. They have a son named Kristupas, a boy of about 10. Juste is married to Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), and together they have a daughter, Urte, around the same age as Kristupas.
The initial dynamic among the two families is quietly complex. The children engage in innocent, mischievous behavior—smashing clay figurines, chasing each other around—as their parents unpack. Ernesta and Juste seem close, their sisterhood apparent in their shared smiles and unspoken understanding. Yet under the surface, tensions simmer. Tomas, for instance, engages in risky behavior, including reckless driving, suggesting a need to assert dominance or distract from deeper insecurities. He even proposes sparring with Lukas, the professional fighter, but quickly retreats from the challenge—a gesture loaded with subtext.
These small interactions speak volumes. Lukas and Ernesta, struggling financially and unable to secure a loan for a home, may harbor resentment or shame in the presence of the more affluent Tomas and Juste. A sense of being “behind” in life, of losing the unspoken competition of adulthood, begins to quietly erode the seemingly serene surface of the family gathering.
One of the film’s most beautiful, yet haunting, scenes involves the sisters getting up to perform a choreographed dance—an old routine, clearly rehearsed many times throughout their youth. Their synchronized movements suggest intimacy, nostalgia, and comfort. It’s a shared memory come alive. But it’s also something else: a fragile performance of togetherness, tinged with longing and a desperate grasp for a simpler past that is no longer within reach.
Up until this point, the film maintains a steady, meditative pace. Then, roughly 35 minutes in, something happens.
What exactly occurs is never explicitly stated. There is no dramatic declaration, no horror-movie twist. Instead, the timeline seems to fracture. The film begins to loop back on itself. We return to scenes we’ve seen before—the sisters dancing, the families unpacking—but now the details are altered. The dance, for instance, is performed to a different song. The shot is the same, the angle unchanged, but the emotional resonance has shifted. What was once familiar now feels uncanny.
Are we watching a memory? If so, whose memory is it—Ernesta’s or Juste’s? Could this be a dream, or a hallucination? Is the film retracing events to make sense of a trauma that refuses to be understood?
The brilliance of Drowning Dry lies in its refusal to answer these questions definitively. The movie isn’t about solving a mystery in the traditional sense. It’s about inhabiting the space of emotional rupture. The repetition of scenes is not gimmicky; it mirrors how trauma lodges itself in the brain. When something unimaginably painful occurs, the mind cannot process it linearly. Instead, it returns again and again to the site of injury, obsessively combing over details, seeking clarity, and encountering only more confusion.
As the narrative spirals in on itself, the family unit begins to fragment. The adults drift apart, not necessarily through arguments or melodrama, but through silence, through the slow, aching realization that things can no longer be as they were. Even the moments that once offered unity—the dance, the shared meals, the children’s laughter—begin to feel alien, distorted, unreachable.
The sisters’ dance, a symbol of their bond, is repeated multiple times throughout the film. Each iteration is different. The steps remain the same, but the mood shifts—sometimes playful, sometimes mournful, sometimes vacant. The song changes. The meaning changes. In the realm of grief, even memory is suspect. What did the moment truly feel like? What was the real song playing in the background? Was it even the same for both sisters?
This shifting ground is the essence of Drowning Dry. Bareisa’s artistic approach doesn’t simply illustrate the effects of trauma—it replicates them. He withholds information not as a stylistic flourish, but as an emotional necessity. We, the audience, are placed in the shoes of the characters, groping for understanding, piecing together a narrative that refuses to hold steady.
One might be tempted to call the film abstract or cold because of its emotional distance and lack of conventional storytelling beats. But this would be a misreading. The distance is the emotion. Bareisa doesn’t spoon-feed us feelings; he evokes them by showing how difficult they are to access in the aftermath of something shattering. The film never tells us directly what the central trauma is. We can guess, we can speculate—but just like in real life, the facts don’t matter as much as the emotional aftermath. And in Drowning Dry, that aftermath is rendered with quiet, devastating precision.
In many ways, the camera becomes a character itself—a ghost hovering in the periphery, watching, waiting, inching closer but never quite intruding. Bareisa uses long takes not just for stylistic flair but to maintain the integrity of each moment. The camera rarely cuts away, forcing us to live in the space with the characters, to feel the unease and ambiguity they themselves are grappling with.
There are no stock shots in the entire film. Each composition is carefully constructed, purposeful, and distinct. The lack of close-ups is particularly noteworthy. We are never granted easy access to the characters’ inner worlds. Instead, we observe them from a slight remove, just as they seem to observe themselves—dissociated, detached, trying to make sense of the fracture that now defines their reality.
The visual language of the film is enhanced by the use of mirrors and reflections, which create a layered experience of space and time. These reflective surfaces often capture characters in moments of solitude, as though they are confronting fractured versions of themselves. It’s a simple but powerful technique, reinforcing the idea that our perceptions—of ourselves, of others, of the past—are constantly shifting, never fully reliable.
What ultimately makes Drowning Dry so haunting is its commitment to portraying grief not as a narrative event, but as a state of being. Grief is not sadness. It’s not something that peaks and resolves. It is chaos. It is disorientation. It is the rupture of time and identity. Life continues around you, but you remain stuck—frozen in the moment where everything broke.
The film captures this paralysis with aching authenticity. By looping back, by replaying scenes with subtle variations, by refusing to give viewers clear answers, Bareisa paints a portrait of grief as a landscape with no map. His characters are not simply grieving; they are trapped in grief, unable to move forward, unable to find peace.
Drowning Dry is not a film for everyone. It demands patience, sensitivity, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. But for those who accept its terms, it offers a rare and profound exploration of the human psyche in the wake of trauma. Laurynas Bareisa has crafted something quietly revolutionary—a film that doesn’t just tell a story, but re-creates the emotional texture of loss, confusion, and memory.In the end, Drowning Dry leaves us not with closure, but with a feeling—a whisper of recognition, a flicker of shared sorrow, a deep and resonant silence. And sometimes, silence is the only true way to speak of what cannot be said.
