Director: Olivia Newman
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Garret Dillahunt, Ahna O’Reilly, David Strathairn, Sterling Macer Jr, Michael Hyatt
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 125 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

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Rating notes: Mature themes, violence and sex scenes

This American mystery drama tells the story of a girl who was abandoned by her parents and older siblings as a child, and who learns to survive on her own in the marshlands of North Carolina. The film is based on a popular novel, authored by Delia Owens in 2018.

This drama is based on a New York Times best-selling novel of the same name, authored by Delia Owens. The film is directed from a screenplay written by Lucy Alibar, and co-produced by Reese Witherspoon. The movie follows the novel on which it is based, and tells the story of a resourceful, resilient and independent young girl, Kya Clark (Edgar-Jones), who grows up in the marshlands of Carolina, US, after being abandoned in them as a young girl by her family in the 1950s. Kya’s family was beset by domestic violence – her mother ran away from the violence of her husband toward her; and her older siblings followed. Kya stayed by her father, but her father later deserted her. She survives on her own in the marshlands, and narrates the film.

Following her abandonment, Kya grows up to become a young woman, who authors and illustrates reference books in her town community on the local flora and fauna of the marshlands. The film is set in the fictional, coastal town of Barkley Cove in North Carolina in the 1960s. Dillahunt and O’Reilly play Kya’s emotionally distant and rejecting parents.

Kya was ostracised by most of the local town community and considered too wild to know, but she gains respect as an intelligent author of reference books on the marshlands. Simply known by many people in the town as the ‘Marsh Girl’, things take a different turn when she reunites with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), whom she knew as a young girl. Tate falls in love with Kya, and it was Tate who taught her to read and write. Kya always valued what Tate did, but felt deserted when he went off to college to further his education. She experienced abandonment, once more.

After Tate departed to college, Kya met Chase Andrews (Dickinson) in town, and she became romantically involved with him. Chase promised her marriage, but that never happened. Kya ended her relationship with Chase when he tried to rape her, and when Chase attempted to assault her, she hit him hard, and escaped back into the marshlands. Later, Chase was found dead on the town’s riverbank, and Kya was charged with his murder.

The evidence against Kya seems irrefutable. She was accused of the murder of a man who assaulted her, and it was Chase (once considered the town’s most eligible bachelor), who relentlessly pursued her. Chase was married to another woman when he tried to rape Kya, and Kya becomes the chief suspect in the murder of a man she once knew, and with whom she is known to have been romantically involved.

The movie tries to hold on to the tension of its drama, but tension is dissipated by the number of intervening flashbacks which mix past and present a little distractingly. The acting of Kya by Edgar-Jones, however, is perceptive, and she effectively holds the film together by the stoicism she exhibits under stress, which captures the complex resilience of a threatened woman, fighting a violent past. The movie has particularly rich cinematography. Lush marshlands are captured by excellent camerawork, which is replaced in the latter half of the movie by courtroom scenes in which Kya is on trial. As the trial against Kya continues, what really happened stays ambiguous right up until the film’s final scenes where the vital clue to Chase’s death is suddenly revealed – and as the film’s title signifies, like crawdad birds, ‘every creature does what it must to survive’. The trial reveals secrets that were buried in the marshlands community for a long time, and Kya’s lawyer, Tom Milton (Strathairn), comes out of retirement to defend Kya by summarising for the jury the extent of the town’s bias against her.