Where the Crawdads Sing is based off of the novel by Delia Owens and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya Clark also known as the Marsh Girl in 1969 North Carolina and she has lived there away from the main town all her life much to the mocking and dismissiveness of the townspeople but when she is accused of murdering a young Quarterback (Harris Dickinson) she must defend her name before the law and a town that more than once has turned its back on her and hated her for the way she has lived her life.
Where the Crawdads Sing was a movie I had hoped would do well in the box office as it was being pitched at the female audience who have been among the most hesitant to return the theatres since the worst of the pandemic has passed us by and also I had heard from some good friends of mine that they really enjoyed the book and that it was ripe for a film adaptation so I went in hoping for the best.
And for the most part I didn’t hate it but I did have some issues with it but firstly I will touch on what does work and top of that list is Daisy Edgar-Jones herself, she is excellent in this movie and I couldn’t believe she was a British actress as her North Carolina accent is that good I thought she was from the Southern USA area and also she does a lot of good physical acting with her eyes, her walk, her body movements as if she was one of the many animals who live in the Marsh but this one is human instead of a bird or a fish plus her facial expressions say a lot as well, I hope I get to see more of her in future movies as she shows an awful lot of promise here.
And also I enjoyed the films romantic scenes and love story for the most part, I was taken in with those moments more than I thought I would based off of the preview for the film I’d seen in front of other films and Edgar-Jones has pretty good chemistry with Dickinson and Taylor John Smith who plays Tate another boy who begins to warm to Kya and teaches her things the Marsh cannot.
But where this film falls over sadly is in its courtroom scenes, don’t get me wrong they aren’t terrible but they also don’t really do very much for the film either and they firstly feel like they go on for a long time and suck all of the momentum out of the film and its Marsh storyline but also Kya just sits there and stares off into space and again it feels like the life out of this film is being sucked out of it in a vacuum cleaner.
And also David Straithairn who plays Kya’s lawyer is okay but there were a number of times where I felt he looked very frail in his scenes on the stand questioning people in the witness box and I couldn’t help but think that perhaps it would have been better if another actor who was slightly younger was cast in that role instead.
And lastly the Marsh itself looks a little disappointing on film, I can imagine for those reading the book that the Marsh feels like a character in and of itself in the story, it feels inviting/dangerous/full of wonders and thick bush that would’ve looked great on film in the right hands and done it justice but here it just looked like a normal grassland at times and that was disappointing as well.
And so that was Where the Crawdads Sing and it’s a mixed bag for me overall, it has very good moments but also very disappointing ones and because of that it gets a 2 and a half out of 5 from me.
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