Force of Nature: The Dry 2 is an Australian mystery thriller film based on Jane Harper's 2017 novel of the same name, and is a sequel to the 2020 film version of Harper's The Dry. Director Robert Connolly returns alongside Eric Bana, who reprises his role as lead protagonist Aaron Falk.
When five women take part in a corporate hiking retreat and only four come out on the other side, Federal Agents Aaron Falk and Carmen Cooper (Jacqueline McKenzie) head deep into the Victorian mountain ranges to investigate in the hopes of finding their whistle-blowing informant, Alice Russell (Anna Torv), alive.
The film was released on February 8, 2024. It was originally due to be released on August 24, 2023, however it was postponed due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.
Tropes:
- Accidental Misnaming: Daniel addresses Lauren as 'Laura',showing that even though she is one of his employees, she is not on his radar.
- Accidental Murder: Alice dies after Lauren shoves her over when after catching her attempting to abandon the group and she hits her head on a rock. Alice was still alive when Lauren left her, but suffered a Time-Delayed Death.
- Asshole Victim: Alice, the missing woman is a bully who was embezzling from her employer and then cut a deal with the police to inform on her bosses in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Extreme Doormat Lauren finally snaps; infuriated by her so-called friend Alice's refusal to apologise for her daughter Margot being one of the gang who bullied Lauren's daughter Rebecca. When Alice says that she is proud of Margot and pities Rebecca for having someone as pathetic as Lauren as a role model, Lauren attacks her and violently shoves her to the ground. Alice hits her head on a rock and later dies from her injuries.
- Cell Phones Are Useless: Ian tells the group that the corporate retreat is a social media free zone and forces them to hand over their phones before they set off on the hike. Alice secretly keeps a second phone with her, but it turns out there is no signal in the mountainous terrain. She briefly manages to get a signal and make a call to Aaron, but all he can make out from her garbled message is that she is in trouble.
- Chekhov's Gun: When Ian shows Aaron and Carmen the waterfall that marks the start of the trail the hiking group was taking, Aaron asks how tall it is. Ian says it is only about 15 metres, but that the pool at the base is at least that deep again and the pressure makes it almost impossible to get out. At the end of the film, Lauren falls off the top of the waterfall into the pool and Aaron is forced to dive in after her.
- Contrasting Sequel Setting: The first film was set in a small Australian town going through a years' long drought, with the potential danger of a wildfire. This film is set in a temperate rain forest where it's constantly damp or raining, and an incoming storm threatens to flood the area.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Daniel Bailey runs an investment company that launders money for organized crime and allows white-collar criminals to evade tax.
- Cutting the Electronic Leash: Ian tells the group that the corporate retreat is a social media free zone and forces them to hand over their phones before they set off on the hike. Alice secretly keeps a second phone with her, but it turns out Cell Phones Are Useless as there is no signal in the mountainous terrain.
- Data Drive MacGuffin: The reason why Aaron and Carmen — Australian Federal Police officers who investigate financial crimes — join the search for Alice Russell when she disappears on the corporate retreat in the wilderness is because Alice was acting as The Mole inside a company they are investigating, and had a flash drive containing the evidence they need to convict Corrupt Corporate Executive Daniel Bailey on her when she vanished.
- Death by Falling Over: Alice dies after Lauren shoves her over when after catching her attempting to abandon the group and she hits her head on a rock. Alice was still alive when Lauren left her, but suffered a Time-Delayed Death.
- Don't Go in the Woods: Five women take part in a corporate hiking retreat and only four come out on the other side.
- Extreme Doormat: Lauren is quiet, retiring type who has lived her whole life in the shadow of, and being pushed around by, her louder, more aggressive 'friend', who doesn't care that she has stepped all over Lauren to get what she wants. She is such a nonentity at work that one of her bosses can't even remember her name, and the other one gets basic facts like the name of her daughter wrong. Throughout the film, she tends to fall in behind whoever is being loudest and most dominant.
- From Dress to Dressing: After Bree is bitten by a funnel-web spider, Beth uses Jill's scarf as a compression bandage to immobilize Bree's arm.
- The Ghost: Kovac, the Serial Killer who used the forest as his hunting grounds forty years before the events of the film. Sergeant King comments that Kovac is still alive (and presumably in custody), and while he never appears, his presence hangs heavy over the search for the missing woman.
- GPS Evidence: The nest of fruit bats the women disturbed allow Aaron and Ian to work out which of of the dozens of possible valleys they had actually entered.
- A House Divided: Relationships within the corporate retreat are already slightly strained before the hiking group sets off. Things get worse after Bree leads down the wrong trail, and then the map is lost in flooded creek. After Alice deliberately leads them in the wrong direction, then tries to force them to keep hiking after they find shelter, things finally erupt into physical when she announces her intention to leave with or without them, and tries to take her phone and the group's only working torch.
- Hungry Jungle: A hungry temperate rain forest. The five women trek through deep, lush rain forest, slipping on rotting leaves, sinking into mud, negotiating swift currents, and constantly watching the dripping sky. The women's personality clashes are inevitably heightened, and then dwarfed by the vast sweeping landscape that threatens, at every turn, to swallow them whole.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Aaron goes looking for Beth and finds her having a cigarette and a bottle of beer outside the lodge. She begs him not to tell anyone because, under the terms of her probation, she is not supposed to drink, but after the nightmare events of the corporate retreat hiking trip, she really needed a drink. Noting that she is only having a light ale, Aaron promises not to tell.
- Land Down Under: Shies away from the dangers of the outback to show the less commonly seen, but no less deadly, alpine wilderness.
- Jerkass: Alice is not a very nice person. Everyone who works with her identifies her as a bully, and her 'in your face' attitude and insistence that she is right only gets worse as the group gets further and further lost. She eventually provokes the group into into physical violence: largely directed against her.
- MacGuffin: The thumb drive containing the incriminating files Aaron and Carmen need to prosecute Daniel Bailey, and which Alice is carrying when she goes missing on the hike through the wilderness.
- Mistaken for Cheating: Jill Bailey assumes her husband Daniel is having an affair with Alice Russell because of all the time he is spending with her. Daniel is actually working with her to find The Mole inside his company; not realising that Alice is the mole.
- Mistaken for Romance: When Margot sees Aaron getting out of her mother Alice's car, she assumes he is one of her mother's boyfriends; when he is really her police handler.
- The Mole: After discovering that Alice embezzled $10,000 from Bailey Tennants, Aaron and Carmen force her to become an informant inside the company so they can get evidence against Daniel Bailey.
- Must Have Nicotine: Beth is the only smoker among the group. Being in a smoke-free venue, she keeps sneaking out to have a cigarette, even though technically the entire grounds are supposed to a no smoking area.
- Posthumous Character: Aaron's mother Jennifer Falk only appears in the flashbacks to the camping trip the Falk family took to the same area of the mountains decades earlier. She died at the end of that trip.
- Revealing Injury: Bree was bitten by a funnel-web spider while on the corporate retreat hiking trip. When Aaron finds Alice's body, he sees the broken stump with a funnel-web web inside next to the body and realises that this was the spot Bree got bitten, which, in turn, means that she knew that Alice was dead and had said nothing.
- River of Insanity: Five women take part in a corporate hiking retreat deep in the Victorian mountain ranges. Over the course of the hike, the group gets lost, loses the map in a flooded creek, suffers several injuries, and—before they can find their way out—one of the group disappears.
- Scenery Porn: The film, shot in the Dandenong Ranges and the Latrobe Valley, contains plenty of spectacular shots of the rugged but beautiful Victorian alpine wilderness. When the lost hikers stumble upon the lookout, all of them are struck by the beauty of where they are, despite the danger they are in.
- Second-Face Smoke: During the disastrous hiking trip, Beth lights up a cigarette, and Alice—who is being a Jerkass—tells her to put it out. Beth responds by exhaling a stream of smoke into Alice's face.
- Serial Killer: The mountain wilderness where the hiking group gets lost used the be hunting grounds of a serial killer named Kovac. While lost, the women discover Kovac's hut, which the police have been searching for for decades.
- Smug Snake: Corrupt Corporate Executive Daniel Bailey who, when he thinks Aaron has lost the evidence that could have brought him down,delivers a speech about how outmoded ideas like good and evil are in today's society.
- Stealing from the Till: Alice embezzled $10,000 from the company she works for to avoid her daughter getting expelled from her exclusive private school by making a donation to the school.The Australian Federal Police use this crime to give them an in: forcing her to act as The Mole inside Daniel Bailey's company in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
- Take My Hand!: When Aaron finally persuades Lauren to come away from the top of the waterfall, he reaches out a hand to help her. However, as she turns towards him and reaches for his hand, she slips and falls over the edge; forciing Aaron to diive after her.
- Time-Delayed Death: Alice dies after being shoved by Lauren and striking her head on a rock. She is still alive when Lauren leaves, and when Lauren comes back the next morning and Alice is gone, Lauren assumes that she recovered and continued to walk out of the valley; not knowing that Bree had moved the body off the path and hidden it.
- Time-Shifted Actor: In the flashbacks to Aaron Falk's camping trip with his parents to the same mountains where Alice has now disappeared, the teenage Aaron is played by Archie Thomson.
- Trust-Building Blunder: Five women take part in a corporate hiking retreat and only four come out on the other side.
