A film review by Craig J. Koban September 20, 2022

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

2022, PG-13, 125 mins.

Daisy Edgar-Jones as Catherine 'Kya' Clark  /  Taylor John Smith as Tate Walker  /  Harris Dickinson as Chase Andrews  /  Michael Hyatt as Mabel  /  Sterling MacEr Jr. as Jumpin'  /  David Strathairn as Tom Milton  /  Garret Dillahunt as Pa  /  Eric Ladin as Eric Chastain  /  Ahna O'Reilly as Ma  /  Jojo Regina as Young Kya

If one looks past some of its more logic straining elements and a final act that simply doesn't work really well at all, then it'll be easy to get lost and invested in the Southern period mystery thriller WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, based on the 2018 best selling novel of the same name by Delia Owens.  

I would aptly describe this drama as a kitchen sink affair, seeing as it has so many elements thrown in: Family secrets, child abandonment, three way love triangles, backwoods sex, and, yes, murder and a subsequent investigation and court case that looks to slowly reveal whether or not the main female protagonist committed it out of malice or self-defense...or whether she did the crime at all.  As a legal potpoiler and murder mystery, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (and yes, crawdads - or crayfish - don't actually sing...the title is a metaphor, people) is pretty underwhelming and mostly on genre autopilot, but on a performance level and in terms of immersing us in its time and place, this Olivia Newman directed affair is robustly realized and becomes a reasonably engrossing piece of Southern Gothic. 

The main thrust of the narrative - which awkwardly seesaws between past and present throughout - concerns a young girl named Kya that was abandoned by both her abused mother and later the perpetrator of that abuse in her father in the North Carolina marshland, leaving this poor kid to fend for and essentially raise herself into adulthood.  The film opens in the fall of 1969 in the fictional Barkley Cove and has a couple of local boys spotting a decaying dead body lying face down in the dirt.  The deceased is revealed to be Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), who's a well known fixture in his parts.  The prime suspect of the murder is his ex-lover in, uh huh, the adult Kya (the wonderful Daisy Edgar-Jones, a remarkable new find), who becomes an easy target for arrest based on her ties with Chase, but also because of her long ostracized status of being a petty "Marsh Girl" that the town has treated with the same respect as a feral child over the years.  Since most of the community is no friend of Kya's at all, everyone seems to be absolutely sure that she is indeed the killer, even though she steadfastly pleads her innocence to authorities.  The only one that seems drawn to her appeals and case is retired attorney Tom Milton (the always cool and refined David Strathairn), who's the Atticus Finch lawyer hero of the film that tries to piece together the evidence at hand and represents a client that's all but despised and deemed guilty before proven innocent.

In many lengthy interviews with her, Tom is able to discover much of Kya's depressing upbringing and childhood, which then takes the form of multiple flashbacks within flashbacks.  We learn that her mother was so beaten and battered by her monstrous and alcoholic husband (Garret Dillahunt) that she had to leave him and Kya.  Being left to deal with her toxic father at such a young age proved to be a nightmarish task for Kya, leading to her being suddenly abandoning by him at elementary school age and forcing her to live and support herself.  She has a childhood BFF in Tate (played as an adult by Taylor John Smith), who gives her some much needed home schooling about reading and writing, but as the two blossom into adulthood Tate is forced to say goodbye to his childhood pal and later lover by tending to his own scholastic dreams that take him away.  Kya unfortunately rebounds with Chase, who seems like the proverbial bad boy and bad news that this girl should have avoided like the plague.  After an initially budding romance, Kya begins to see the error of her ways and tries to distance herself from the ever increasingly domineering Chase, and she tries to escape into her art and transcribing everything that she witnesses around her in the natural world.  She becomes such an intuitively gifted naturalist when it comes the North Carolina marshland that she's even spotted and offered a lucrative book deal, but impeding her way towards independence and financial freedom is that vile and possessive minded Chase, and when his corpse is found all eyes point towards Kya.   

The atmosphere present in WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING is one of its chief selling points, and under the watchful eye of cinematographer Polly Morgan the film maintains a stunning sheen of environmental verisimilitude throughout.  You can feel and taste the humidity of the beautiful and sometimes intimidating marshlands that surround these characters and essentially becomes a secondary character in itself.  The compositions, lightning choices, and lingering shots of the vistas contained within make WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING an early Oscar contender in this category, and this is undeniably one of the most sumptuously shot films of 2022.  Complimenting this is the resoundingly fine performances permeating this film, with most notable exception going to the British born Edgar-Jones, who not only flawlessly inhabits the southern drawl and mannerisms of her troubled protagonist, but manages to make her a multi-faceted character of intense interest.  She's a timid and deeply guarded figure (no doubt born out of her tortuous upbringing and fending for herself apart from a town that hates her), but she's also convincingly driven and determined and is hell bent on not plea bargaining in her case; she wants her innocence proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Edgar-Jones is stellar in this complex role, and she's finely complimented by her partner in crime (no pun intended) in Strathairn ultra's straight arrow attorney, who may not have much of an overall character arc here, but nevertheless brings a certain level of soft spoken gravitas and conviction that only he can effortlessly muster.   

I also latched on to some of the thematic terrain covered here, like how Kya is a borderline hopeless underdog that's been disrespected by not only her father, but local townsfolk and has to overcome supreme obstacles in her coming of age story to achieve some level of self-actualization.  That, and her character not only has to persevere against class discrimination and resentment, but also through abject poverty and while being forced against her will by multiple abusive men that want to have their way with her.  That precluded her to grow up the hard way in the wild and all on her own, and seeing her journey is an intrinsically compelling one.  However, this all ties into some of the aforementioned hard-to-swallow elements in the film that distract away from the whole, like, for instance, that Kya is simply too attractive to be credible.  This is a person that lived in a ramshackle cabin buried deep in the wetlands of a very harsh and hot climate and spent a majority of her childhood and teen years segregated from just about everyone and everything...yet she's so unbelievably clean cut looking and pristine.  Even though she has been aggressively dubbed "The Marsh Girl," she looks like she'd have no problem whatsoever gracing the cover of Teen Vogue, and with minimal pampering or fuss.  Trust me when I say that no recent film has presented a mostly feral girl (with no virtually no education, family support, social contact or financial aid) as spiffy clean looking as what's shown in WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING. 

Two other things taint this film, like how the story jumps back and forth between Eya's childhood in the 50s to her adolescence in the 60s and to her arrest later on...and then haphazardly bounces through those periods again and again as she recounts her tumultuous life to her lawyer.  There's a genuine lack of editorial rhythm and cohesion to the overall narrative flow here, and those not paying acute attention may easily get lost as to what time period the film is in and what's happening chronologically, how the players figure in, and so forth.  Also, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING is a bit soft-pedaled and lacking sensual edge for what the makers think is an erotically charged romance.  More often than not , the film has the veneer of an achingly safe PG-13-ified young adult soap opera versus truly embracing its adult themes and content as a steamy backwoods murder mystery noir.  Lastly, the final sections of the story - set decades in the future and building towards a would-be shocking plot twist - come off as simultaneously forced fed and rushed and ends on a flimsy, anticlimactic note.  There's two basic possibilities as far as Eya's case goes - she's either guilty or she's not.  I won't spoil the reveal, other than to say that the manner that it's quickly tied up and not nurtured properly for a satisfying dramatic payoff is a deep letdown.