Where the Crawdads Sing Review: Building a Dreadfully Clichéd Mystery

Based on the 2018 bestselling novel of the same name, Where the Crawdads Sing spins a soapy yet dramatically inert and often tone-deaf yarn about societal rejection and female empowerment in the wetlands of North Carolina. Set between 1953 and 1969, the film follows Kya (first played by Jojo Regina and then by Daisy Edgar-Jones), who’s abandoned by everyone in her family and left to fend for herself in the remote marshlands where she grew up. Why neither her mother (Ahna O’Reilly) nor any of her older siblings brought her along when fleeing from their drunken, abusive father (Garret Dillahunt) is the first of many convenient, inexplicable twists of fate that the film has in store for audiences.

Kya’s life has its many setbacks, but despite the tragedies she endures, the film’s sanitized portrait of her impoverished existence more often sees her post-familial life as one of Edenic tranquility rather than of constant toil and self-sufficiency. Many of the nearby townspeople refer to her as “Marsh Girl” and believe she’s feral, but aside from not wearing shoes when she goes into town, she appears much like everyone else. Edgar-Jones tries her best to render Kya as more than just a victim of circumstance or a charity case, but her character is too thinly conceived and far too refined, in speech, demeanor, and appearance, to be remotely credible as someone who’s survived by herself for over a decade in such rough surroundings.

Kya’s only companionship or assistance initially comes from the Black couple, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt), who own the local general store. The duo embody the time-worn, offensive trope of kindly and subservient Black persons being defined entirely by their usefulness to white heroes. And, regrettably, this utter lack of nuance or complexity extends to virtually every other character in the film, including Kya’s love interest, Tate (Taylor John Smith), an angelic hottie who, merely from the goodness of his heart, regularly motorboats in from town to teach her how to read and write.

Presumably, the film’s blunt morality about the mistreatment of outsiders, the joys of complete independence from society, and many of the rote characterizations are drawn from Delia Owens’s source novel. But director Olivia Newman and screenwriter Lucy Alibar do little to blur the deeply drawn lines that so clearly separate good and evil. These divisions are most explicitly addressed through the investigation and trial that result from Kya being charged with the murder of Chase (Harris Dickinson), the arrogant jock she got involved with after it appeared that Tate had abandoned her for college. But, of course, yet another savior figure, a bastion of decency and justice named Tom Milton (David Strathairn), steps in to defend her when most of the town is eagerly waiting for her to get the death sentence.

This murder mystery is meant to inject tension and intrigue into the proceedings, but considering that it’s such a crucial element of the book, it’s surprising just how half-heartedly rendered it is in the film. The courtroom drama does serve as a structuring device: In addition to bookending Where the Crawdads Sing, we catch glimpses of it in the many flashbacks that tell the rest of Kya’s life story. But whether or not Kya committed the murder ultimately ends up being beside the point, so these many listless sequences serve only to repeatedly hammer home just how prejudiced and cruel most of the townspeople are.

Ironically, while most of the film’s undercooked drama is centered on Kya’s love affairs with Tate and Chase and the legal case surrounding the latter’s death, it’s when Kate flourishes on her own, trying to make a living by selling her beautiful illustrations of the area’s animals, insects, and marine life that Where the Crawdads Sing briefly gains a pulse. Perhaps it’s because these stretches give the viewer a much-needed break from the relentlessly trite dialogue and grandiose, life-affirming statements that the characters spout.

More likely, though, it’s because it’s during these stretches of the film that Kya feels like a flesh-and-blood individual, thriving on her unique talents rather than sleep-walking through the narrative as a bland avatar of goodness going through the predictable machinations of mediocre YA fiction. For as much as it wants to celebrate the commitment of a woman to her ideals and sense of self, Where the Crawdads Sing is an exceedingly vapid and derivative affair.