Where the Crawdads Sing   

Review: written November 2022

Soft-edged drama, atmosphere over substance

Crawdad’s got a fairly mixed response at best when it was released – most people feeling it fell short of the books impact. Well, I’ve never read the book, and while it’s no classic I found it mildly absorbing and pretty innocuous.

Kya is a young girl, who through a series of circumstances ends up living alone in the marshlands of North Carolina. When a body is uncovered, the mysterious ‘marsh girl’ is brought in for questioning. Two timelines unfold, interspliced through the running time of the movie. Kya’s childhood and growing into a young woman, and her growing relationships with a few people from the town. The other, has the ever reliable David Strathairn as Kya’s lawyer, trying to figure out how to defend his reluctant client against the charges of murder laid against her. Both are kind of interesting, but the impact of each is diluted and even lost, as the movie fails to commit to being either the coming of age movie, or the murder mystery it first sets out as.

I was swept along with the atmosphere of the movie, even while feeling that for swamplands everyone seemed dressed in nice clean cottons without a smidge of dirt. I enjoyed the growing relationships with the young men who led to her later predicament, even while feeling large chunks seemed improbable, and other relationships such as with the black store-owners seemed underserved. In fact, for a movie set in the deep South during a time of intense racial tension, we feel little of that part of the local culture evident in the movie.

Performances are fine, and Daisy Edgar-Jones convinces as the mysterious Marsh Girl, and the product of her troubled origins. David Strathairn brings some sparks to the screen when allowed, which is all too seldom, and there is no thunderous final oration in the courtroom that he could have delivered so well. The photography captures the beauty of North Carolina, while never capturing any dirt beneath the proverbial fingernails.

A whole lot of intriguing ideas and settings then, but I felt short changed by each of them. I can only give the movie credit for having succeeded in making me so interested in each of the seeds of ideas, while bemoaning feeling none of the fruit of those ideas I was hoping for. If that all makes it sound a turnoff, that very innocuous nature makes it an undemanding watch – I didn’t feel cheated spending my time watching it, so if you’re looking for some harmless yet atmospheric froth, this might do the trick.