‘Waterdrop’ Review: A Rape Allegation Kicks Off a Probing Examination of Corruption and Impunity in Gripping Drama

In a world where corruption runs rampant, only money — not truth, let alone justice — reigns supreme. The men in Robert Budina’s “Waterdrop” take that statement as the organizing principle of their lives. It is their dogma, the only way they understand the world. But the drama at the heart of Burdina’s gripping Albanian drama comes from its lead, a city hall manager who thinks herself equally above the law, finding out in real time how such a system depends on the kind of latent if not outright violent misogyny she’s convinced herself she exists outside of, when she is really its most obvious example.

Aida (a standout Gresa Pallaska) is a woman in charge, a woman whose pride in her own privilege and power makes her immune to imagining a world where she doesn’t get her way. In her work, she’s used to charming (and sometimes bribing) foreign investors to do her bidding, to sign the many building contracts that allow her and her husband Ilir (Arben Bajraktaraj) to live a moneyed, carefree life in the small town they’ve made their home. A fixer who can walk into any room she pleases — board rooms, police headquarters, even her bedroom — and get what she wants on her own terms, Aida is not a warm presence, yet she’s clearly leveraged (or perhaps even developed) that hardened exterior in order to be so successful. 

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One morning, Aida’s world is turned upside down when her teenage son Mark (Paolo Iancu) is taken into custody, having been accused of raping a young girl. According to her testimony, the young girl was lured to a villa rented in Mark’s name where she was eventually tied down (with a bag over her head) and repeatedly assaulted. Awash in the world of accounts owed and settled, on petty rivalries and brokered alliances, Aida immediately assumes foul play: Someone must be framing him in hopes of icing her and Ilir out from the lucrative deal they’ve just signed.

“He’s just a kid. How can a kid do something so ghastly?” she asks herself. It’s easier for her to understand this turn of events as an extension of the corrupt world in which she moves so freely. But as more details begin to emerge, and as her husband and the powerful men he enlists to help clear Mark begin to sideline her more and more, Aida is left to wonder how complicit she is or can let herself become if she is to put her son first, ahead of everything — including, pointedly, the actual truth.

“Waterdrop” keeps us tightly focused on Aida. Her motherly need to protect Mark — even when his despondency triggers a kind of warning sign within her — keeps running up against the persona she’d created for all to see. Soon enough, she sees the life she’d created for herself and her family about to be completely upended. The extreme lengths she’ll go to safeguard what she’s built are traced alongside an intriguing indictment of the power of corruption in this erstwhile Soviet country, where wheeling and dealing over new construction go hand in hand with the impunity boys like Mark (and his friend Denis, who may or may not have been at that villa that night, who might have recorded Mark manhandling the girl in question, who could be the person Mark is covering for) take as their righteous right.

Budina, who co-wrote the film with Ajola Daja and Doruntina Basha, doesn’t make Mark’s innocence (or his guilt, for that matter), the central concern of the film. “Waterdrop” doesn’t unfold like a procedural, nor like a he-said, she-said drama, though it borrows elements from such narrative frames. Instead, this is a story about how a system creates the very circumstances that allow Mark and Denis to approach what they did with the nonchalance of the privileged.

“Why don’t you call the police?” Mark asks his father early on. “Don’t you know everyone?” And so, as the film carefully unfolds and reveals what happened at the villa, it also carefully unravels its central character, whose tragedy becomes all the more inevitable for it. Pallaska is the film’s anchor, the tenor of her performance matching the steely disorientation Budina engenders the more Aida finds herself losing the ground on which she’s built her career, family and home.

Throughout, “Waterdrop” marries a straightforward naturalism with more elliptical stylistic flourishes — in dialogue, as when we’re treated to a myth about Lake Ohrid during a business meeting, as well as in imagery, as when off-camera conversations score shots from above of fish being deboned on the plate during a luncheon. The result is an engrossing film that works as a modern fable about corruption, masculinity, impunity and the way towns and countries and families alike find it hard to disentangle the way those three forces complement and reinforce one another.