By Teri Kinne
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 8/10/25 –Laurynas Bareiša’s Drowning Dry continues a successful run in Los Angeles before moving on to other states. Its much-lauded international run includes wins for Best Director and Best Performance at the Locarno Film Festival. Lithuania’s official submission to the 97th Academy Awards® for Best International Feature. The story is a force to experience and a visual and audio beauty to view and hear. 
Unfolding like a puzzle with missing pieces, Drowning Dry demands stillness and attention. The film centers on Lukas, a martial artist whose triumphant fight becomes the prologue to a shattering emotional aftermath. Told in nonlinear fragments and viewed through Bareiša’s precise cinematography, the film opens with a martial arts competition and drifts into a carefree summer getaway with friends and family. Everything is so real, typical. Told minimally, with space for the viewer to fill in backstory and relationship dynamics, summer life is a picnic at the lake until a small accident happens. A mortal tragedy is avoided, and the aftereffects are being handled appropriately. Help and a swift return to normal life seem only moments away, only to be smashed by another turn of fate, like a fly who buzzes past a hand shooing him, only to be smacked flat by a swatter.
The characters’ lives are ordinary and just as extraordinary as we all are in our everyday life. Small moments, such as vacuuming, folding clothes, and eating, are special when you are among family you like, kids that are yours. The moments slow, tiny but precious, and even more so in the rearview mirror when, by the end of the film, we know they will never have an opportunity to live anything like them again.
The ensemble cast: Gelminė Glemžaitė, Agnė Kaktaitė, Giedrius Kiela, and Paulius Markevičius, delivers performances that feel lived-in and unforced, echoing the film’s minimalist style.
The film makes abrupt jumps in time and setting, both forward and backward. I followed the jagged turns, but with some lag-time that had me working hard to understand where we were in the timeline. I don’t mind working hard for a sensitive piece like this.
My favorite part are 120 seconds (two minutes!) of the two men sitting at the picnic table bountiful with a celebration dinner complete with tall cake, waiting. The setting a bucolic lake forest in summer. They are tensely and quietly waiting. Not talking, just snacking. Being men. Helpless and hungry. We the audience sit through the uncomfortable with them. There are lake noises, mouth noises, breathing.
Later in the film we’ll return (now months later) to that same bountiful table of food abandoned and rotted. The cake collapsed on itself, a malformed pile of decay, black with mold.
Drowning Dry achieves something rare: it trusts its audience to sit in ambiguity. It does not explain or comfort. For those willing to give it space, it lingers.
Los Angeles @ Cinema Lumiere: August 8-14
Cleveland, OH @ Cleveland Cinematheque: July 31 & August 3
Albuquerque, NM @ Guild Cinema: August 4-7
Nantucket, MA @ Nantucket Dreamland: August 6
Seattle, WA @ NW Film Forum: August 15-17
