Now available on Hulu (in addition to rental or purchase on VOD services like Prime Video), Where the Crawdads Sing was a rock-solid late-pandemic box office hit, grossing $122 million worldwide, proving that medium-budget Movies For Adults may still have life beyond streaming. It helps that it’s based on Delia Owens’ bestselling novel – 15 million copies sold – set in the East Coast swamplands, where a local creep turns up dead, and all fingers point at the local loner woman, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones (who’s having quite the year, considering we’ve already seen her in the horror-comedy Fresh and prestige-TV series Under the Banner of Heaven). But will the film offer anything to audiences who haven’t already been wooed by the book’s pageturner charms?
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: BACKLEY COVE, NORTH CAROLINA, 1969. It’s a wild place. Swampy. Humid. Remote. Beautiful. Two boys spot something – a body. A man. Dead. In the mud. At the foot of a rickety old fire tower. Near where the Marsh Girl lives. The Marsh Girl, real name Kya Clark (Edgar-Jones). We hear her voice via narration: “A swamp knows all about death,” stuff like that. She lives way out here all by herself. The townsfolk snicker at her. Bet the weirdo in the woods did it. Who else would do it? The cops investigate the death, and their comments telegraph all sorts of things. Of the dead man: “Best quarterback this town ever had.” They visit Kya’s house, see her collections of feathers and wildlife drawings: “She a scientist, or a witch?” Are they cops, or just a-holes?
They haul Kya in. She speaks barely a word. A kind man visits her cell. A lawyer, Tom Milton (David Strathairn). He says he’ll help her. Flashback: 1953. Kya (Jojo Regina) is maybe eight, nine years old. Her Paw (Garret Dillahunt) is a horrible, horrible man who viciously beats her, her mother and her gaggle of siblings. Everyone leaves, and she’s stuck with boozing, miserable Paw, treading tenderly until he leaves too. She’s resilient, though. Fends for herself. Finds a knife, harvests mussels, sells them to the local shopkeeps, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt). They’re warm, kind. Mabel suggests that Kya try school. She does. She’s shunned and ridiculed. She never goes back. She has no shoes or clean clothes. Does she have running water? Don’t think so. Will anyone in this plot do the right thing or the logical thing?
No, because if they did, the plot wouldn’t happen like its creators want it to. There’s a scene in which a man from Social Services asks Mabel and Jumpin’ about Kya, and they fib a little until he leaves. They deduce that a group home would just be worse for an eight-year-old with no shoes or supervision or education living all alone out in the marsh and shucking mussels to survive. I’m not so sure about that, but will concede that it’s a tough call. Mabel finds her a pair of shoes, though. Now we go back to adult Kya in the jail cell. Does she want to plea bargain? No frickin’ way. And then it’s back to 1962, when she’s in her late teens and meets the nicest guy, Tate (Taylor John Smith). They love watching the wildlife; they exchange feathers they find and smoosh lips amidst a swirl of falling fall leaves. He teaches her to read and write and they fall in love and he’s gentle, so gentle, but then he leaves too, for college, and reneges on a promise. Heart. Broken.
Forth we go, to scenes in a courtroom where Kind Lawyer Tom pokes holes in the prosecution’s case while sadfaced Kya doodles birds in a notebook. Then we’re back to 1968 – we’re catching up, see. She meets Chase (Harris Dickinson). We know who Chase is – he’s the best football guy ever in Backley Cove. Dunno about this guy, though. A little crass, but plays a mean harmonica. Tate was nearly perfect; Chase is decidedly imperfect. But as Kya narrates, “I was no longer lonely, and that seemed like enough.” Seem like too much to anyone else? We know a shitbird when we see one, don’t we?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Crawdads doesn’t stir up the mystical vibes of the Deep South like Mud does, but it kinda tries. It’s also like The Notebook if its modest charms had been chomped off by a swamp gator.
Performance Worth Watching: Anybody buying Edgar-Jones as a semi-feral woman living in a secluded swamp shack? She plays the character like the school wallflower from an ’80s teen sex comedy who’s targeted by the mean jock and rescued by the nice guy, but with a little more mud between her toes. That leaves us highlighting Strathairn, who enjoys a couple earnest moments despite the screenplay doing him no favors.
Memorable Dialogue: Kya: “I know feathers. The other girls don’t know feathers.”
Sex and Skin: A couple light PG-13 sex scenes; a pretty heavy PG-13 incident of sexual assault.
Our Take: Burning question: Do crawdads – or to be non-colloquial about it, crayfish – make noise? The internet says they have an appendage, a scaphognathite, through which they make little clicky-bubbly noises. No singing, no humming, nary a note. But I’m being literal, and “where the crawdads sing” is a metaphor for Kya’s place of refuge, where she’ll escape cruel, violent men. Digging deeper into this awkward look-at-me-I’m-LITERARY device only makes these shallow waters muddier: Is where the crawdads sing an actual physical place somewhere deep in the marsh where all of Kya’s beloved birds and bugs live? A place within the mind of psychological safety or strength? Is it where she might allegedly murder one of those cruel men? Or is “where the crawdads sing” an attempt to fish a capital-S Symbol from the muck of half-considered faux-belletristic narrative swampland? (Be thankful: It could’ve been called Where the Humpbacks Hump.)
I’m trying here, I really am. But there’s not much substance to this quasi-Gothic melodrama beyond vague squeakings about the cruelties of 20th-century American civilization. Toxic masculinity is a big one: Buncha creeps out there! Outsiderdom is another: Gossips and namecallers suck! There’s vaguely something about the ugly racial dynamics of the era: Mabel and Jumpin’ are Black, and they’re outsiders too! Women have to be strong: Look at Kya, she’s very strong! She also somehow knows how to apply makeup despite being isolated from society for a decade-and-a-half. Must’ve learned that off-screen, in between all those narrative time-hops. Maybe from Mabel, who’s like a mother to her, sort of, or at least it’s almost implied, or the movie wants it to be implied, but doesn’t try too hard to imply it, because there’s too much plot to work through.
Speaking of plot, Crawdads is a three-headed monster: Whodunit, romance, and courtroom drama. The first unfolds like a well-worn routine, not a suspenseful nailbiter. The second is Hallmarked schmaltz. The third is toothless and simplistic. Director Olivia Newman is all too comfortable with cliches: The cops find some fibers on the body matching a hat found in Kya’s house. Kya and Tate mash on the beach as the waves wash over them. The courtroom gallery gasps with every revelation. We roll our eyes and maybe even guffaw at some of this junk, all of it corny, melodramatic and vaguely maudlin. Yet we see it through to the end, not because we’re invested in the characters and their well-being, but just to see what happens, to see if the conclusion as unconvincing as every scene that came before it. And lo, it is. The crawdads are in misery here. They don’t sing, they just screech in pain.
Our Call: Beneath the marsh muck the crawdads click-bubble through their scaphognathites an instinctive and urgent primal message sourced from deep within their DNA: SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
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