Friday new releases: 9 February 2024

Force of Nature and Charcoal are in cinemas

It has been a busy week of watch­ing lots of stuff for anoth­er pro­ject, so there are no new stream­ing reviews today, sorry. And cinema open­ings are light with only an unin­spir­ing Australian sequel and a sur­pris­ingly deep Brazilian black com­edy to work with.

The Dry (the first one) was an enter­tain­ing who­dun­nit with a strong sense of place and it was a good vehicle for lead­ing man Eric Bana and some of Australia’s best char­ac­ter act­ors. Jane Harper, author of the nov­el the film was based on, had three Aaron Falk books in the port­fo­lio so it seemed sens­ible to think of these as a poten­tial fran­chise for Bana to pro­duce and star in.

Unfortunately, he and writer-director Robert Connolly seem to have lost track of what made the ori­gin­al film work and have pro­duced a them­at­ic­ally top-heavy muddle that doesn’t even sat­is­fy on a plot level.

A key whistle-blower in a fin­an­cial fraud case that Falk is build­ing against a firm of shady money man­agers, has gone miss­ing dur­ing a cor­por­ate tramp­ing retreat in the remote Victorian bush.

Desperate to find the com­puter files she had been copy­ing that morn­ing, Falk and his part­ner (played by Jacqueline McKenzie) insinu­ate them­selves into the search and res­cue effort. Falk is also a teeny-weeny bit guilty about how much pres­sure he had been put­ting on the woman (Anna Torv from Secret City) but not so much that he isn’t still des­per­ate to find that thumb drive.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

White col­lar crime and cor­rup­tion have been bug­bears for Connolly since forever – see 2001’s The Bank star­ring Anthony LaPaglia – but Bana’s Falk is burdened by more than just an obses­sion with the job. A tra­gic fam­ily his­tory with the area and a 40-year-old seri­al killer cold case both serve to com­plic­ate things and leave Bana with only one moody note to play.

The Dry was some­times quite funny but Force of Nature, frankly, isn’t and it feels much longer than its less-than-two-hour run­ning time.

There’s good work being done all over this pro­duc­tion – Richard Roxburgh as a slimy cor­por­ate creep stands out – but the script isn’t strong enough to pro­pel us to a sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion and we were left with too many unre­solved questions.

Brazilian black-comedy Charcoal is about what you get when poverty and piety come up against each other. 

A poor fam­ily, strug­gling with med­ic­al costs for their wheelchair-bound pat­ri­arch, pray to God for a solu­tion but end up mak­ing a dev­il of a deal instead. An Argentinian drug deal­er, fak­ing his own death to try and stay one step ahead of his many enemies, needs a place to hide.

When they agree to stash him in Granddad’s room, they don’t real­ise that a wave of tox­icity is going to wash over them all, threat­en­ing to reveal fam­ily secrets, some of which have nev­er even been shared with God.

Shot with National Geographic qual­ity gor­geous­ness by writer-director Carolina Markowicz and cine­ma­to­graph­er Pepe Mendes, Charcoal shows us what hap­pens when you let evil into your house – even if you think it’s too weak to do you harm.

Further listening

Back in January 2021, I appeared with my cur­rent RNZ Nights spar­ring part­ner, Emile Donovan, on Summer Times to talk about … Eric Bana in The Dry. Small world.