Drowning Dry: how an award-winning Lithuanian drama captures the disorientation of trauma

‘Dry drowning’ refers to the delayed onset of respiratory problems after a swimmer breathes in water. The medically controversial term provided the fitting, unnerving title for a film that is slow to take hold but stays under the skin, in which meaning collapses, and danger is uncontainable. 

Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareisa won the best director award at Locarno last year for his haunting, unusual and oblique second feature, known as Drowning Dry in English (Seses, its original Lithuanian title, means Sisters.) Defying the rules, easy sensationalism and clear resolution of the conventional thriller, it replicates instead the disorientation and fragmentation that is the hallmark of traumatic experience and memory, as a family’s countryside getaway is derailed by a calamity – an accident we do not witness directly and struggle to interpret, as we careen back and forth through a time-line flooded with shock, grief and the cruelty of chance.

Drowning Dry, a co-production between Lithuania and Latvia, is the follow-up to Bareisa’s Venice-awarded, equally cryptic and restrained Pilgrims (2021), which plumbed similar psychological territory in its portrayal of a group of individuals floundering to make sense of existence and keep despair at bay in the aftermath of a violent and devastating crime. 

Bareisa’s emergence as one of the most exciting and distinctive new voices in the Baltic region comes at a time cinema from the small nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia is flourishing on the global stage, their national film industries having found their feet after the shaky ‘90s when their independence from the Soviet Union was restored. This year saw Latvia, in a watershed moment, win its first Academy Award, triumphing in the best animated feature category for Flow by Gints Zilbalodis, a humane vision of an anxious new world, in which a dark grey cat navigates a deluged natural environment in search of somewhere liveable. 

Drowning Dry plunges us into a world of debilitating loss that is intimate and familial, but its terrain of collective trauma is shared by much new cinema from the Baltic states, as they process a turbulent history.

An almost banal, everyday milieu of domestic realism and petty family tensions is set up in the first stretch of Drowning Dry, before the rug is pulled out from under us. Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite) and her sister Juste (Agne Kaktaite) co-own the home by the lake where they grew up, which they now use as a holiday getaway, amid financial uncertainties and unresolved plans for the property. It is the birthday weekend of Juste’s husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), and the sisters head to the country house with their partners and children to celebrate, after a mixed martial arts championship tournament that Ernesta’s husband Lukas (Paulius Markevicius) fights in, and wins. 

Lukas has a reckless, cocksure aspect to his character that drives him to court danger, whether in the ring or driving on the open road, and this is a significant source of anxiety for Ernesta, who has long stopped romanticising his risky behaviour and near misses. It is a trait that we are aware may foreshadow disaster – especially when we hear the house they’re staying in is an hour’s drive away from the nearest emergency room.

Playful reminiscence takes hold on the deck as the sisters break into a synchronised dance routine to Donna Lewis’s 1996 pop hit about timeless dreaming ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a nostalgia that transports them from mortgage headaches and relationship strife. Just as the past is only a fleeting place to hide, fretting over future security will soon prove drastically futile. 

Tragedy in Drowning Dry is not one pivotal event, so much as a state of being that upends the family like a contagion and spawns further crises, bending our nerves in unexpected directions. Withholding contextual signposting and revelatory elucidation from us, Bareisa allows confusion to spread through the episodic scenes like noxious fumes, as fear and mortality have their way. But so, too, do hope, resilience and the will to adapt, as the families must forge a new understanding of reality, and rebuild connections afresh. 

This is a film concerned less with depicting death in all its vivid horror, than with humanity’s almost miraculous ability to survive.

Drowning Dry is streaming on Klassiki until 15 May.