Movie Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Speaking as someone who can't comment on the quality of the adaptation (given there's been no significant backlash from the fans of the book, I'll assume that it's at least pretty faithful), it's easy to see why Where the Crawdads Sing was a bestselling novel. It's basically a period soap opera that mixes several crowd-pleasing genres (romance, mystery, legal drama, coming-of-age, good old-fashioned misery/poverty porn) together with just enough salaciousness to make the jaws of middle-aged people whose primary entertainment consumption comes from the CBS primetime lineup drop to the floor. 

To be fair, the story it tells about a reclusive young woman named Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who gets arrested for the murder of a young man (Taylor John Smith) that she previously had a romantic relationship with despite no evidence linking her to the crime being found at the scene isn't an uncompelling one. There's some intrigue to be had in watching Kya-who grew up mostly alone in a secluded marsh-attempt to navigate a murder trial in a North Carolina town where nearly everyone has viewed her as a vile, scary freak for her whole life and Edgar-Jones is a captivating lead who brings understated feelings of pain, resilience and pride to Kya that helps roots the character in a tangible humanity that likely wasn't present in the script's stage directions.    

The problems with Where the Crawdads Sing just about exclusively lie with how the story is told. All of the transitions between the flashbacks and present timeline are clumsy enough to ensure that the jarring nature of the time jumps (along with the genre shifts that often coincide with them) are fully felt and the development of Kya's key relationships with her abusive father (Garret Dillahunt) that abandons her as a child, the nice man (Harris Dickinson) who breaks her heart as a young adult and man she's accused of killing all feel stunted due to the film's eagerness to set up the next scenario where Kya emotionally or physically suffers. Having an ending that is so sickeningly sappy that it feels like it was lifted straight from the pages of a Nicolas Sparks book seals Crawdads fate as a potentially interesting film that is kneecapped by its dodgy handling of the actual meat of its narrative. While it's never close to bad enough for me to regard it as a painful or unworthy watch, my lasting memories of Where the Crawdads Sing will likely be limited to Edgar-Jones' impressive ability to elevate such average material and the Taylor Swift song that plays during the end credits. 

Grade: C+