Eric Bana in Australian Thriller

Australian writer-director Robert Connolly had a domestic hit in 2021 with The Dry, a slow-burn murder mystery built around Eric Bana’s somber performance as a pensive city cop drawn back to the remote town of his childhood in the middle of a prolonged drought. Bana returns as Aaron Falk in Force of Nature: The Dry 2, which is otherwise a sequel in name alone. The setting this time is a lush and very wet mountain rainforest, drenched by a massive thunderstorm at a key point in the narrative. That makes half the title a complete misnomer.

This is a handsomely produced, solidly acted thriller that’s certainly watchable, though the perplexing subtitle is not its only issue. Unlike its riveting predecessor, it’s absorbing but never quite gripping.

Connolly sticks to novelist Jane Harper’s template from the first book in her Aaron Falk trilogy, in which the Australian Federal Police detective’s investigation stirs up memories of the tragic death of a friend from his youth, which left behind unanswered questions. But this time, the detours into a traumatic experience from Falk’s childhood — a thread not present in the source novel — are an inorganic distraction that slows everything down and makes an already introspective protagonist even more closed-off.

Stories of missing persons or deaths set against a natural world both beautiful and threatening that keeps its secrets are a frequent theme of Australian cinema going back at least as far as Picnic at Hanging Rock. Connolly effectively taps into the hold on the imagination of such mysteries with his set-up here.

A group of five women on a corporate hiking retreat set off through a rainforest in the Victorian mountain ranges but only four of them return, and no one can seem to pinpoint exactly when the fifth member of the party went missing. What was planned as a team-building exercise instead deepens the schisms among the co-workers at a financial investment company.

While the case would ordinarily be strictly a local search and rescue police operation, the identity of the missing woman, Alice (Anna Torv), brings Melbourne detective Falk and his investigative partner Carmen (Jacqueline McKenzie, wasted in a nothing role) to the scene. It’s revealed early on that Alice is a whistleblower, leveraged by the Feds into feeding them information to build a corporate malfeasance case against the company run by arrogant business kingpin Daniel Bailey (Richard Roxburgh).

Glimpses into that investigation and the search for Alice are intercut with an extensive account of the women’s time in the wilderness, which is the most compelling part of Force of Nature. The group is led by Daniel’s tough-cookie wife Jill (Deborra-Lee Furness); it also includes sisters Beth (Sisi Stringer) and Bree (Lucy Ansell) and young mother Lauren (Robin McLeavy).

It turns out that all of them have had friction with Alice, an abrasive colleague who doesn’t invest much in making friends. And the one thing Beth, Bree and Lauren can agree on is that the dynamic changed abruptly on their first night in the rainforest when Daniel broke off from the separate men’s group to join them, whisking Alice off among the ferns for a private word.

The steady deterioration of their rapport as they find themselves far off the path without a map provides strong material particularly for Torv, who makes Alice fearful, but still cagey, defensive and blunt; and Furness, whose spiky, good-humored Jill would not be easily intimidated even if she weren’t one of the company heads. Their nerves are further jangled by the specter of a serial killer based in the area 40 years earlier, some of whose victims were never found.

Standing in for the fictional Giralang Ranges are magnificent Victorian locations in Great Otway National Park, the Dandenong Ranges and the Yarra Valley. Cinematographer Andrew Commis takes full advantage of all the natural splendor, from the spectacular waterfall that marks the start of the women’s hike to the growing claustrophobia of the dense foliage and its canopy as their plight becomes more desperate. Peter Raeburn’s ominous score enhances the moody undertones.

What weighs the film down is that while assembling new parts of the puzzle and wrestling with guilt over the pressure he placed on Alice and how that might have endangered her, Aaron keeps retreating in his mind to a family hiking trip when he was a preteen boy (played by Archie Thomson).

Past and present folded together seamlessly in The Dry, echoing across the decades. As the young Aaron and his father (Jeremy Lindsey Taylor, the other holdover from the earlier film) become separated from the boy’s mother (Ash Ricardo), a frantic search ensues. But rather than adding complexity to the drama, these recollections give the mainframe narrative a halting rhythm that lessens the suspense. They also make you wonder if this cop ever gets a case that doesn’t reopen old wounds.