Laurynas Bareisa’s drama premieres in Locarno

Part of the appeal of Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareisa’s subtly powerful second feature, Dry drowning (Seses), is that you never know if what you’re watching is taking place in the present, past or future. Time slips back and forth in a way that constantly pulls the viewer out of their comfort zone, but never at the expense of the story. If anything, the fragmented narrative only adds to the sense of tragedy that hangs over this sober story of two families whose summer vacation goes horribly wrong.

And yet everything seems to start out quite pleasantly for Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite). She sets off with her husband Lukas (Paulius Markevicius, who sometimes looks confusingly like Klaus Kinski) and their younger son to a country house by the lake. They are accompanied by Ernesta’s sister Juste (Agne Kaktaite) and her husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela, who starred in Bareisa’s first feature film). pilgrim) and her daughter, who seems to be about the same age as Ernesta’s child.

As the families unpack their suitcases and settle into the peaceful country life, there is already a certain tension in the air: Lukas, an MMA fighter whose championship fight opens the film, was victorious but also took a severe beating. Ernesta seems fed up of seeing her husband being beaten, and she keeps her distance from him during the opening scenes, tending to his wounds but otherwise ignoring him in the bedroom.

Meanwhile, Juste and Tomas’ marriage is going through its own considerable teething issues – as is made clear early on when the latter eagerly strips naked in front of his wife, only to be left hanging (quite literally) to the point of ridicule. Juste seems to want nothing more than to spend quality time with her sister, and we later learn that the house they live in has been in her family for a generation or two.

At first glance it looks like Dry drowning will follow the two couples as they experience love and hate on varying levels during their vacation – which sounds like the formula for a number of French films set in idyllic settings. Country House where desires are ignited and then suppressed. But Bariesa pulls the rug out from under us about a third of the way through the film, in a scene where Juste’s daughter suddenly falls into the lake and remains underwater.

The tragedy comes out of nowhere, during a one-take sequence that starts casually, even playfully, but then transforms in the blink of an eye. (Bariesa was his own cinematographer, and his sober, carefully orchestrated shots recall the work of Michael Haneke.) But what comes after the lake scene is even more harrowing. The film suddenly jumps to another place and time, where we find Ernesta and her son in an indoor swimming pool in Vilnius, where the latter has been taking lessons for some time.

Did Ernesta’s niece drown in the lake? And what happened to Lukas, who seems to have disappeared from history? Was he killed in another brutal MMA fight?

Bariesa doesn’t answer these questions immediately, but instead switches between different timelines as he slowly but surely reveals what happened in the country on that fateful day. The answer isn’t exactly what you’d expect, but given everything we’ve seen before, it’s entirely logical. The director’s approach has a powerful cumulative effect, with all the fragments eventually coming together to form a coherent whole that carries the sting of real disaster and loss. We see snippets of life, but rearranged multiple times until they’re shaped into a believable story about overcoming trauma.

The Lithuanian title of the film, Sesestranslated to Sisterswhich refers to the many ups and downs that Ernesta and Juste experience together throughout the film. But the English title is perhaps more revealing: it refers to a psychosomatic illness that affects people who have survived a drowning accident or witnessed the drowning of another person.

The effect is akin to that of suffocation—and that’s exactly the tone Bareisa often conveys when exploring the ripple effects of a tragic event affecting multiple characters over several days, months, and even years, until the film eventually returns to how things originally began.

As hopeless as this may sound, Dry drowning is not necessarily depressing either. Before the truth about what happened comes to light at the end, other fragments show in the most open way possible how life goes on for those who managed to survive. They may carry a deep sense of loss within them, but also the possibility of always starting over again.