Where the Crawdads Sing

A social outcast with a love of nature is accused of murder in Olivia Newman’s pretty but vacant adaptation of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel.

Daisy Edgar-Jones is having the sort of meteoric rise that is normally confined to the final act of a Disney film. The British actress first peered out from behind a fringe with her giant doe eyes just two years ago as a Sally Rooney surrogate in Normal People, before having parts of her devoured by Sebastian Stan in Fresh. Now she secures bona fide Hollywood movie star status by heading up Where The Crawdads Sing, based on one of the best-selling books of all time.

The book, from the famed author Delia Owens (who is wanted by Zambia authorities in connection with a murder) tells the story of Kya (Jojo Regina), who is abandoned by her family as a child and grows up alone in a North Carolina marsh. She survives by selling mussels to a local general store run by a sweet and humble Black couple, the likes of which are normally confined to the middle act of Get Out. As she blossoms into Daisy Edgar-Jones she embarks on two love affairs with blandly handsome men called Chase (Taylor John Smith) and Tate (Harris Dickinson), one of whom ends up dead at the bottom of a fire tower. Kya is put on trial for their murder and has to face judgement from the community that always rejected her as the “marsh girl”.

Edgar-Jones manages to not embarrass herself despite the heavy-handed dialogue, faithfully taken directly from the book’s pages – its fandom will be pleased to hear lines like “I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.” made the cut and are said by Edgar-Jones with impressive sincerity. Meanwhile, the always excellent David Strathairn does his absolute best playing Kya’s lawyer Tom Milton but is lumbered with courtroom dialogue that is written as though Atticus Finch suffered a head injury. Where the dreamy atmosphere conjured up in the mind of the reader might have papered over the cracks, the utter naffness of the writing is painful when tumbling out of the mouths of actors who deserve better.

For a film about child abandonment, domestic violence, rape, crippling poverty, and the justice system in 1960s North Carolina, director Olivia Newman’s commitment to a cutesy aesthetic is bizarre. The marsh girl who the townspeople describe as being “the missing link” is immaculate at all times, with a fresh blowout and a dewy contour, costumed in flowing white broderie anglaise summer dresses. Her “shack” feels curated by an interior designer and the marsh itself is captured in perpetual golden hour, all dappled sunlight and Caribbean blue seas.

Instead of a complicated protagonist at the centre of an atmospheric thriller Edgar-Jones seems trapped in an ill-advised antebellum-themed Taylor Swift music video, exacerbated further by Swift’s dulcet tones heard over the end credits. Where Benh Zeitlin’s Louisiana-set Beasts Of The Southern Wild covered similar territory, Hushpuppy’s world was a magical, elegant place even at its most brutal. Meanwhile Kya’s is so toothless and the aesthetic so rote that it feels like the creation of a committee of Instagrammers.

Published 18 Jul 2022

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