Review: 'Where the Crawdads Sing' is a Southern Gothic train wreck, but Daisy Edgar-Jones' performance is captivating

I have never read Delia Owens’ best-selling novel “Where the Crawdads Sing” — I’m not a book-club person — so I can’t tell you if the many problems of the movie version are engrained in the source material or in the adaptation. But it’s a Southern-fried mess.

The movie starts in fall 1969, and a young man is dead at the base of a fire tower overlooking a marsh in coastal North Carolina. The deceased is Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), the golden boy of the nearby town, Barkley Cove. The sheriff (Bill Kelly) only has one suspect in mind: Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), called “the marsh girl” by the folks in town, who know only folk tales about how she lives alone in a rundown home at the edge of the marsh.

The story — with Lucy Alibar, co-writer of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” adapting Owens’ novel — goes off on two divergent paths. The less interesting one is a courtroom procedural, with Kya on trial for Chase’s murder, represented by the folksy lawyer Tom Milton, played by David Straithairn, who deserves better. These scenes aim for “To Kill a Mockingbird” resonance, but land closer to “Matlock” territory.

The better parts of the movie are the flashbacks, showing how Kya got to this point. Kya (played as a little girl by Jojo Regina) was taunted by the kids in school, while struggling to survive at home with an abusive, alcoholic father (Garret Dillahunt) after her mother (Ahna O’Reilly) and siblings abandoned her. She often retreated to the marsh, finding in nature a refuge that family couldn’t provide — along with lessons about how creatures in nature do what they must to survive.

It’s an older Kya, now played by Edgar-Jones (who portrayed the doomed Brenda Lafferty in the “Under the Banner of Heaven” miniseries), who meets Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), a nice boy who offers to teach Kya to read and write — and encourages her to collect her nature drawings into a book. They also share a romance, though Kya’s heart is broken when Tate leaves for college and doesn’t return. This is when Chase enters the picture.

The thinly realized characters in this love triangle are one problem with the film. Another is the bizarrely ahistorical way the story dances around race in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s; the only Black characters the movie shows us are the saintly store operators, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt), who assist the young Kya when she’s left alone in the marsh. 

Is there anything that can salvage this movie? No, but Edgar-Jones’ exploration of Kya, facing loneliness and longing on one side and holding on to her fierce independence on the other, captures an emotional resonance deeper than what’s on the page. Director Olivia Newman assembles a solid creative team, including cinematographer Polly Morgan and production designer Sue Chan, that gives the marsh setting an ethereal glow.

The most telling sign of the movie’s problems comes at the end, and the much-publicized Taylor Swift song, “Carolina,” that plays over the final credits. Swift understands the assignment, and channels more dark currents in five minutes than “Where the Crawdads Sing” does in two hours.

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‘Where the Crawdads Sing’

★★

Opens Friday, July 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault. Running time: 125 minutes.