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

Laurynas Bareiša’s “Drowning Dry” is a movie whose difficulty of form is intended to amplify and underscore difficult events. Mr. Bareiša, who also wrote the screenplay, doesn’t overplay his hand in terms of narrative disruption: He is, on the whole, a self-effacing stylist, preferring a low-key approach to high-stakes tragedy. 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.

The film takes its title from a phenomenon whose tendencies and terminology have been a matter of dispute. In 2017, news reports told the story of a young boy who died of what has been dubbed “secondary” or “parking lot” drowning — that is to say, a delayed response to having inhaled water. The Journal of the American Medical Association came out strong against “this myth of dry drowning.” Mr. Bareiša defers, dubbing it “a rare … complication,” but, then, one has to consider how an artist might favor metaphor over fact.

At the core of “Drowning Dry” are two sisters, Juste (Agnė Kaktaitė) and Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė), each of whom is 30-ish, attractive, and married to a complicated, competitive man. Juste’s husband, Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), is a businessman, a blowhard and not shy about flaunting his relative wealth or extravagant pot belly. Lukas (Paulius Markevičius), in marked contrast, has abs to die for: He’s in top form as a professional mixed-martial arts competitor. The film begins with Lukas taking the prize in a local tournament.

He exits the contest jubilant, but also bruised and bloodied, a champion who has undergone a flurry of hard knocks and swift kicks. Ernesta breaks down in the locker area soon thereafter; she’s frazzled that the man she loves has a job as peculiarly brutal as this one. 

As a means of celebrating the win, but also to escape from it, Juste and Ernesta have arranged a holiday for both families at a lake house that they’ve inherited. Tagging along are the tweenage son of Ernesta and Lukas, Kristupus (Herkus Scrapas), and Urté (Olivija Eva Vilune), the slightly younger daughter of Juste and Tomas. 

There’s tension afoot in this bucolic landscape. Lukas has been turned down for a mortgage to buy a home, what would be his and Ernesta’s first. Asked for his advice and possibly a loan, Tomas is brusque in his response, noting that the life of a freelance fighter isn’t likely to instill confidence amongst the banking classes. 

In the meantime, Juste’s frustration with her husband extends from Tomas’s expensive taste in cars to his unwanted advances in the bedroom. The kids? They misbehave, they’re bored, and they’re happy to repeat the foul words that pepper their parents’ conversations.

“Drowning Dry” takes a turn and shuttles its trajectory when everyone goes to the lake for a swim. The dads are in charge of the horseplay; the moms are there to register bemusement. But when Urté is thrown in the water and doesn’t ascend, an idyllic summer’s day comes to a shocking halt. Tomas dives under the water, retrieves his daughter, and brings her to the shore. His efforts to revive her fail. It’s only when Lukas shunts an ineffectual Tomas aside and performs CPR on Urté that death is avoided.

Or is it? Up until this point in the story, events roll out in a straightforward manner, but when Mr. Bareiša returns us back in time, with nary a how-do-you-do, we can’t help but scratch our heads — first in puzzlement, and then in frustration. An asynchronous series of events occur, all of which scuttle our suppositions about the character, fortunes, and fate of the main players. These shifts of time and circumstance, done with increasing frequency as the picture reaches its endpoint, occur without fanfare. 

Sounds annoying, don’t you think? Still, Mr. Bareiša’s upending of expectations gains a grudging credence when considered in retrospect, and it’s a mitzvah that he never loses a grasp on the tenets of basic human decency. “Drowning Dry” is one of those movies likely to gain traction on repeated viewings, a prompt that will, I think, be more a pleasure than a duty.