Movie review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in the movie adaptation of the best-selling novel Where the Crawdads Sing.

English actor Daisy Edgar-Jones, who broke out with the 2020 miniseries Normal People, takes on her first major cinematic leading role in this adaptation of Delia Owens' 2018 best-selling mystery drama.

Edgar-Jones, affecting a subtly convincing Southern accent, plays a woman named Kya in late 1960s North Carolina who is arrested for murder at the beginning of the film.

As she awaits trial, Kya fills the audience in on her tragic backstory. Growing up in the North Carolina marshes with an abusive father, Kya sees her family members desert her one by one, eventually leaving her on her own as a 12-year-old. Fending for herself with the help of a kindly couple who run the local shop, Kya raises herself and becomes a self-sufficient, if illiterate, young woman whom the townsfolk derisively refer to as "Marsh Girl".

As a teenager, Kya reconnects with a childhood friend, Tate (Taylor John Smith, from Kiwi director Roseanne Liang's Shadow In The Cloud) who teaches her to read and love blossoms. But Kya is abandoned by the college-bound Tate, and she eventually takes up with local golden boy Chase (Harris Dickinson), whose murder she is later accused of.

The film intercuts between her trial, where she is defended pro bono by a local lawyer played by David Strathairn, and her travails in the marsh, where, amid all the romance, her observant nature and artistic talent lead to her becoming a published naturalist.

Although it embraces a raft of familiar Southern Gothic cliches, Where the Crawdads Sing has enough going on to keep things interesting as it switches between the tones of a John Grisham adaptation and something closer to The Notebook.

The intercutting between the two threads is inelegant to the point of distraction and had me longing for a more linear telling of the story. There's nothing especially notable about the legal thriller aspects, but the romantic storyline carries old-fashioned weight, making this pretty hard to resist in the end.

Edgar-Jones is an empathy-generating performer whose giant eyes demand compassion from the audience, making it impossible not to root for Kya's hard-fought independence. Smith and Dickinson are a bit too visually interchangeable as actors, but both acquit themselves with dignity. Strathairn effortless emits large amounts of kind decency.

This is one of those adaptations where you can really sense how much more authentically things would have played out on the page. On-screen, I found myself occasionally laughing out loud at moments that were meant to be deadly serious. Still, some of the dark stuff is appropriately grim.

The haphazard storytelling eventually coalesces into a more coherent whole, and as dismissive as I felt earlier in the movie, the climax got me in the gut. And the tear ducts.

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Harris Dickinson, Taylor John Smith
Director: Olivia Newman
Running time: 125 minutes
Rating: M (Violence & sex scenes)
Verdict: Eye-roll inducing Southern gothic potboiler gets there in the end