‘Drowning Dry’ Review: A Vacation Goes to Hell and Back in a Warped and Haunting Lithuanian Drama

‘Drowning Dry’ Review: A Vacation Goes to Hell and Back in a Warped and Haunting Lithuanian Drama

Laurynas Bareiša's "Drowning Dry" examines a family tragedy from myriad sides and outcomes in a skillfully directed psychodrama that feels like a combination of Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund.

Starting With a Head-Scratcher of a Title, ‘Drowning Dry,’ Laurynas Bareiša's New Movie Is Anything but Straightforward

The film’s fracturing of linear time and the suggestion of alternative scenarios has a Cubist flavor, a sense that the everyday is fraught with multiple congruities.

Drowning Dry Director Laurynas Bareiša on Finding Comedy in Tragedy, Nicolas Roeg, and the Things We Can’t Process

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 New Directors/New Films coverage. Drowning Dry opens in theaters on July 18. Conan O’Brien can be forgiven for quipping “Over to you, Estonia” after Flow won Latvia its first Oscar last month. The concept of a shared Baltic Cinema is still a relatively obscure one: “We have this complicated identity, culturally,” Laurynas Bareiša explained to me recently at the Riga International Fil…