Olivia Newman’s “Where the Crawdads Sing,” based on the bestselling novel by Delia Owens, is a good-looking melodrama that begins well enough but quickly loses its way, sacrificing moments of genuine humanity and connection for two-dimensional efficiency. It often feels like the film is terrified of alienating fans of its source material. It is unwilling to omit a single plot point, resulting in a film that feels like a sequence of events that never actually comes together to form a coherent character piece. It is a Wikipedia summary cloaked in pretty scenery; appealing to look at, but far from impactful.
The story follows the life of Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman whose family abandons her when she is a little girl growing up in 1950s North Carolina. She spends several years fending for herself, living alone in her family’s cabin in the secluded marshes outside the small town of Barclay Cove. As she gets older, she meets and falls in love with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), a sensitive biologist who teaches Kya to read and write. This romance soon gives way to another, as Kya is then courted by the rich, cocky Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), whose eventual untimely death lands Kya in jail for murder. Defending Kya is a kindly old lawyer named Tom Milton (David Strathairn), who attempts to push past the jury’s prejudice against “the marsh girl” and only present the facts, which would seemingly exonerate her.
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