Three nights at a middling small-town resort would just about cut it - you'd have your own room, at least. But what if the retreat involved trekking and camping deep in the Victorian wilderness, with no mobile phones allowed?

In Force of Nature, the sequel to the smash hit film The Dry, the five women in question range in age, rank and degrees of likeability, which start low and sink lower as the group gets stymied by the weather, and the deep, dense bushland.

They all work for the same company, but there's not much else that links them to each other (other than the two that are sisters). Throw in some navigation issues, a gathering storm and impending pitch black night and it's well and truly time for the women to show their bad - or worse - sides.

Based on the novel of the same name by Jane Harper, the story begins at the end - five women had set off into the deep mountainous terrain of the Dandenong Ranges, and only four have returned. They're all hysterical, one has been bitten by a funnel web, and there's a lot of explaining to do.

And the absent woman, Alice, is already of interest to the police. Enter Aaron Falk, the protagonist of The Dry, now a federal detective working in corporate fraud. Alice has been helping him as a reluctant informer, as he and his team investigate the same company that's sending off its female staff on disaster-ridden adventures in the bush.

And now his informant is missing in the middle of a vast wilderness, with literal storm clouds gathering.

Director Robert Connolly agrees that it's remarkable there haven't been more thrillers using corporate retreats and team-building exercises as the central narrative. Chuck colleagues who don't associate outside the workplace into a situation together, and you have fertile ground for mayhem.

Having directed 2021's The Dry to great acclaim, he says he relished having another crack at the distinct characters Harper is so good at creating.

"For me, cinema is at its best when it's depicting complex characters," he says.

"We know this whole idea of ... likeability, but it's recognisability, really. You want to see and feel real people happen in these stories.

"That's what I loved about [Force of Nature] - the grey area of the morality and ethics of all the characters."

And he's assembled a stellar cast of Australian actors to sink their respective teeth into these characters of varying unlikeability. Eric Bana returns as Aaron Falk - fundamentally decent but capable of ruthlessness in his role of detective. Debra-Lee Furness plays Jill, the senior manager and nominal leader of the pack, and Anna Torv is Alice, impatient, confrontational and self-centred. Jacqueline McKenzie - we haven't seen her much lately - is Falk's sidekick, equally ruthless and far less emotionally involved in the case than Falk. She just wants Alice back as a useful font of information.

And in a small but powerful role, Richard Roxburgh is clearly enjoying himself as the corporate overlord (and Jill's husband) trying to warn Falk off the case.

Connolly, who adapted both books for the screen, is married to casting director Jane Norris who, he says, has a penchant for calling in well-known actors who may have been absent from our screens for some time.

Seeing Furness and McKenzie pop up again is both a source of delight for film connoisseurs and a revelation for newcomers.

"It's this idea that you have these actors that are familiar to our national cinema, but maybe we haven't seen them for a little bit," he says.

"But then Jane's always big on pushing for new talent, too. So those young girls who play [sisters] Beth [Sisi Stringer] and Bree [Lucy Ansell] - having observed it with my own children, I think they definitely nailed that sibling dynamic."

And, in keeping with The Dry's quintessentially Australian setting, Force of Nature takes another type of landscape and makes it cinematic.

"My experience is that Australian cinema is at its best when it is highly specific to Australia, because the rest of the world is then interested in it," Connolly says. He has a point: The Dry - both the book and the film - was a worldwide hit.

Force of Nature was shot in the dead of winter in the Dandenongs, the Latrobe Valley and the Yarra Valley, among other locations, and, true to Harper's original words, the physical environment is as much a character as the five women.

The Dry has a title that directly references its setting - a tinder-dry Victorian town plagued by empty river beds and despondent farmers.

Force of Nature is being billed as The Dry 2, but it could easily be called "The Wet". The characters trek through deep, lush rainforest, slipping on rotting leaves, sinking into mud, negotiating swift currents and constantly watching the dripping sky.

Halfway in, and the viewer longs for the women to just find some shelter and dry out - if only so that we can all think about the next steps.

But nature is, in this case, the great equaliser. The women's personality clashes are inevitably heightened, and then dwarfed, by the vast, sweeping landscape that threatens, at every turn, to swallow them all whole.

"That's a big theme, I think, of the book and the film," says Connolly.

"You're out there, no matter how much money you've got, how much status you're carrying back in the corporate world that they're all from, it doesn't matter. Out there, who will assume the leadership? It's a fascinating dynamic, and cinema does it really well.

"I always think it's like the camera applies a microscope to the human condition, and it hooks into the soul and the character of these people.

"The narrative conceit of the corporate retreat was fantastic and very original. I just can't think of an equivalent in any film."

And he's grateful to Harper for giving him free reign on the adaptation - adding subplots and narrowing down other storylines. In Force of Nature, Falk knows the landscape and is particularly invested in finding Alice because he once almost lost his own mother in the same terrain. This storyline wasn't in the book.

"I feel like one of the things people loved in the first film was that Falk's current situation was so informed by events in the past," says Connolly. In The Dry, Falk arrives back in his hometown to attend the funeral of an old friend who, it seems, has killed his family before taking his own life. It's a commentary on life on the land, but also about how the past can creep into the present, with secrets coming to the surface.

Connolly wanted some more backstory for Falk in his new life as a detective.

"So how do I include these events in the past here? Jane was really happy for us to explore it in that way. And again, that's just a credit to Jane that she's excited that films can further illuminate elements of her story by expanding on things rather than necessarily having to just contract things.

"So it's not just a reductive exercise, trying to make a film."