Five Women Go In & Only Four Come Back: The Dry 2 Cast On Exploring Guilt In The Australian Bush

Mild spoilers ahead. The first adaptation of Jane Harper's Australian crime-mystery novel, The Dry, quickly transformed into a cult favourite. While Australian films can sometimes ere too close to the 'fair dinkum' territory, the flick perfectly balanced a tight crime mystery, excellent character development, and sprawling Australian outbreak landscapes and soundscapes. Now, we're finally being treated to the highly anticipated sequel, Force of Nature: The Dry 2.

This time, we're still following Detective Aaron Falk (played by the phenomenal Eric Bana) as he investigates a missing woman in the Australian bush. The woman is Alice, played by a gripping Anna Torv (The Last of Us, The Newsreader), who goes missing after a group of five women head out on a corporate hiking retreat, with only four women making it out the other side. The cast, made up of Deborra-Lee Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Stringer and Lucy Ansell (as well as Torv and Bana), is mostly women — and all Australian.

Largely exploring how a group of diverse women react and operate under stress and in survival situations, the cast tells Refinery29 Australia that despite the name Force of Nature, the dynamic was anything but natural. "It's a deeply unnatural dynamic that we had as characters in that we were in a corporate hierarchy that is natural to nobody; it's like anti-human," says Robin McLeavy. "So having that imposed on us as characters was really great because it was really restrictive and we had to function within those roles. All of us, in some way, had to break free of them and be broken down by nature."

Lucy Ansell (Strife) adds that the film was a very extreme example of the breakdown of toxic work culture and is emblematic of what this culture can do to a person. "It's symptomatic of a much larger structural issue, which is capitalism," she says.

Ansell is a relative newcomer who plays Bree, sister to Sisi Stringer's (Mortal Kombat) troubled Beth. For both actresses, it wasn't hard for them to portray such a close sisterly bond on screen thanks to their shared experiences. "We are very much in the same community," Stringer explains. "We're young, mixed race, Black in Australia, being queer, we already very much aligned as people."

Meanwhile, McLeavy plays Lauren, a mother with a teenage daughter — something that drove the interactions between her and Anna Torv's character of Alice. In much of the film, you learn about the characters through passing dialogue rather than explicit interactions. "It was really challenging because you never see Anna [Torv] and I be mothers, and we are both mothers in real life," McLeavy says.

The film, which was shot in the depths of Victoria's Otways, the Dandenongs and the Yarra Valley, didn't just pose difficult natural forces that were difficult for the characters to grapple with — it was also a challenge in terms of filming. "The very first day, we stepped out into a rainforest and it was raining and there were leeches and mud," Stringer says.

She explains that the crew also had to carry equipment by hand as locations were unreachable by car. "Every piece of equipment we needed, everything was carried by hand by people down steep, muddy trails in the bush. It was slippery and wet, and they did it all with their hands."

"The toughest crew," McLeavy adds, saying that there was one scene where a cameraperson needed to be "waist-deep" in water for the shot. "I love filming outside because there's just no artifice," she continues. "I felt grounded straightaway. We're on Aboriginal land, and it's a sacred experience. We got to connect with the trees and the water."

What's particularly striking about the film is how it navigates issues of ethics. Many crime dramas do to some extent, but there isn't a clear-cut good versus evil dynamic going on here. Instead, it explores the nuances of what it means to be an intrinsically flawed human. While the audience speculates about Anna's fate for the duration of the film, we're gifted with flashbacks that dive into the unsettling group dynamic, where every character has something they're hiding.

"What I see rather than guilt is a lot of shame, and to me, that's more compelling," McLeavy says. "There's a guilty conscience, but deeper than that, there's a shame around our actions, our behaviours. It was never playing with innocence or guilt; it was more, how much do I feel comfortable to reveal in this moment to these strangers?"

While all their characters are deeply flawed, Ansell says that she tries not to judge her characters. "At no point did I feel anyone was really playing guilty or the bad guy," she says. "I think all of these characters are flawed, but they're trying their best at what they have. I think that's very true to humanity, really."

In sharing the screen with some of Australia's greats like Eric Bana, Deborra-Lee Furness, and Anna Torv, the women tell me of some of the most interesting things they learned by working alongside them. "Watching Eric be an actor/producer and just how generous he was to everybody and how relaxed he was, and he trusted everybody," McLeavy says. "He was a friend from day one."

Similarly, the women speak incredibly highly of Anna Torv, whom they say showed them how to advocate for themselves on set. "Anna is such a machine," McLeavy says, recounting how, on set, she would "command" the room and speak up if something wasn't working. "But she does it with respect and is always so generous," Ansell adds.

Force of Nature: The Dry might have a lot to live up to when it comes to its predecessor. But rest assured, it manages to have the same charm as the original whilst also adding much more depth into Aaron Falk's universe and is anything but dry.