Where the Crawdads Sing film review — marshland murder novel gets muddy adaptation

Three cheers for actress and producer Reese Witherspoon, founder of the wildly popular Reese’s Book Club. Since it was launched in 2017, inclusion has secured all manner of novels a readership, and given many writers a profile. The conclusion is clear: Witherspoon is good for books.

Sadly she may also be bad for films, at least to judge by the twee and clumsy Where the Crawdads Sing. Delia Owens’s debut novel was the book club’s biggest smash: a wrenching tale of nature and justice in the 1960s American South, propelled into selling an eye-popping 12mn copies. That size of audience was never going to be left hanging for long, and in her role as producer, Witherspoon now presents this botched adaptation, opening with the body of a small-town alpha male who has plunged to his death in coastal marshland. (There was evidently no soft landing.)

To Kill a Mockingbird is the obvious touchstone, the suspect revealed as a mash-up of Harper Lee’s recluse Boo Radley and the unjustly accused Tom Robinson. Qualities of each are now wrapped up in one young woman, a gentle soul named Kya (played by Londoner Daisy Edgar-Jones). But to others she is simply “Marsh Girl” — an outsider in a remote North Carolina bayou, cruelly scorned by nearby townspeople.

Early in the film, we meet her as a girl, her penniless family absconding one by one rather than stay with the violent, alcoholic father. But soon he leaves too. Alone, she becomes expert in and skilled painter of the marsh flora and fauna, being taught to read and write by a kindly local boy. (The black owners of the local grocery store are her only other friends; the story’s racial politics might best be called polite.) Next stop: a book deal with a New York publisher. But no! Here comes the murder trial.

Of course, even the most accomplished stories sound trite pared down to bare plot points. Part of the problem with the film is it does exactly that itself. The movie has the jerky, inattentive rhythm of skim-reading. Director Olivia Newman doesn’t hurry or over-compress — she just spends two hours prettily framing Edgar-Jones (charismatic, if never quite shaking off Muswell Hill) while writer Lucy Alibar wheels paper-thin supporting characters into unearned head-spinner twists. Everything feels both fussy and perfunctory, and not a bit of it real.

A book lover like Witherspoon should be delighted. The movie makes a great case for the written word.

★★☆☆☆

In US cinemas now and UK cinemas from July 22