movie reviews on where the crawdads sing

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, where the crawdads sing.

Now streaming on:

The cicadas buzz and the moss drips and the sunset casts a golden shimmer on the water every single evening. But while “Where the Crawdads Sing” is rich in atmosphere, it’s sorely lacking in actual substance or suspense.

Maybe it was an impossible task, taking the best-selling source material and turning it into a cinematic experience that would please both devotees and newbies alike. Delia Owens ’ novel became a phenomenon in part as a Reese Witherspoon book club selection; Witherspoon is a producer on “Where the Crawdads Sing,” and Taylor Swift wrote and performs the theme song, adding to the expectation surrounding the film’s arrival.

But the result of its pulpy premise is a movie that’s surprisingly inert. Director Olivia Newman , working from a script by Lucy Alibar , jumps back and forth without much momentum between a young woman’s murder trial and the recollections of her rough-and-tumble childhood in 1950s and ‘60s North Carolina. (Alibar also wrote “ Beasts of the Southern Wild ,” which “Where the Crawdads Sing” resembles somewhat as a story of a resourceful little girl’s survival within a squalid, swampy setting.)

It is so loaded with plot that it ends up feeling superficial, rendering major revelations as rushed afterthoughts. For a film about a brave woman who’s grown up in the wild, living by her own rules, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is unusually tepid and restrained. And aside from Daisy Edgar-Jones ’ multi-layered performance as its central figure, the characters never evolve beyond a basic trait or two.

We begin in October 1969 in the marshes of fictional Barkley Cove, North Carolina, where a couple of boys stumble upon a dead body lying in the muck. It turns out to be Chase Andrews, a popular big fish in this insular small pond. And Edgar-Jones’ Kya, with whom he’d once had an unlikely romantic entanglement, becomes the prime suspect. She’s an easy target, having long been ostracized and vilified as The Marsh Girl—or when townsfolk are feeling particularly derisive toward her, That Marsh Girl. Flashbacks reveal the abuse she and her family suffered at the hands of her volatile, alcoholic father ( Garret Dillahunt , harrowing in just a few scenes), and the subsequent abandonment she endured as everyone left her, one by one, to fend for herself—starting with her mother. These vivid, early sections are the most emotionally powerful, with Jojo Regina giving an impressive, demanding performance in her first major film role as eight-year-old Kya.

As she grows into her teens and early 20s and Edgar-Jones takes over, two very different young men shape her formative years. There’s the too-good-to-be-true Tate (Taylor John Smith ), a childhood friend who teaches her to read and write and becomes her first love. (“There was something about that boy that eased the tautness in my chest,” Kya narrates, one of many clunky examples of transferring Owens’ words from page to screen.) And later, there’s the arrogant and bullying Chase ( Harris Dickinson ), who’s obviously bad news from the start, something the reclusive Kya is unable to recognize.

But what she lacks in emotional maturity, she makes up for in curiosity about the natural world around her, and she becomes a gifted artist and autodidact. Edgar-Jones embodies Kya’s raw impulses while also subtly registering her apprehension and mistrust. Pretty much everyone lets her down and underestimates her, except for the kindly Black couple who run the local convenience store and serve as makeshift parents (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt , bringing much-needed warmth, even though there’s not much to their characters). David Strathairn gets the least to work with in one of the film’s most crucial roles as Kya’s attorney: a sympathetic, Atticus Finch type who comes out of retirement to represent her.

This becomes especially obvious in the film’s courtroom scenes, which are universally perfunctory and offer only the blandest cliches and expected dramatic beats. Every time “Where the Crawdads Sing” cuts back to Kya’s murder trial—which happens seemingly out of nowhere, with no discernible rhythm or reason—the pacing drags and you’ll wish you were back in the sun-dappled marshes, investigating its many creatures. ( Polly Morgan provides the pleasing cinematography.)

What actually ends up happening here, though, is such a terrible twist—and it all plays out in such dizzyingly speedy fashion—that it’s unintentionally laughable. You get the sensation that everyone involved felt the need to cram it all in, yet still maintain a manageable running time. If you’ve read the book, you know what happened to Chase Andrews; if you haven’t, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it here. But I will say I had a variety of far more intriguing conclusions swirling around in my head in the car ride home, and you probably will, too.

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Now playing

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

Marya e. gates.

Girls State

The Fall Guy

Brian tallerico.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Glenn kenny.

Simon Abrams

Blood for Dust

Matt zoller seitz, film credits.

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault.

125 minutes

Daisy Edgar-Jones as Catherine 'Kya' Clark

Taylor John Smith as Tate Walker

Harris Dickinson as Chase Andrews

Michael Hyatt as Mabel

Sterling MacEr Jr. as Jumpin'

David Strathairn as Tom Milton

Garret Dillahunt as Pa

Eric Ladin as Eric Chastain

Ahna O'Reilly as Ma

Jojo Regina as Young Kya

Olivia Newman

Writer (based upon the novel by)

Delia Owens
Lucy Alibar

Cinematographer

Polly Morgan
Alan Edward Bell
Mychael Danna

Latest blog posts

Meanwhile in France...Cannes to Be Specific

Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar Wastes Its Lavish Potential

Nocturnal Suburban Teen Angst Fantasia: Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow

A Preview of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

Supported by

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Review: A Wild Heroine, a Soothing Tale

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as an orphaned girl in the marshes of North Carolina in this tame adaptation of Delia Owens’s popular novel.

Share full article

By A.O. Scott

“Where the Crawdads Sing,” Delia Owens’s first novel, is one of the best-selling fiction books in recent years , and if nothing else the new movie version can help you understand why.

Streamlining Owens’s elaborate narrative while remaining faithful to its tone and themes, the director, Olivia Newman, and the screenwriter, Lucy Alibar ( “Beasts of the Southern Wild” ), weave a courtroom drama around a romance that is also a hymn to individual resilience and the wonder of the natural world. Though it celebrates a wild, independent heroine, the film — like the book — is as decorous and soothing as a country-club luncheon.

Set in coastal North Carolina (though filmed in Louisiana), “Where the Crawdads Sing” spends a lot of time in the vast, sun-dappled wetlands its heroine calls home. The disapproving residents of the nearby hamlet of Barkley Cove refer to her as “the marsh girl.” In court, she’s addressed as Catherine Danielle Clark. We know her as Kya.

Played in childhood by Jojo Regina and then by Daisy Edgar-Jones (known for her role in “Normal People” ), Kya is an irresistible if not quite coherent assemblage of familiar literary tropes and traits. Abused and abandoned, she is like the orphan princess in a fairy-tale, stoic in the face of adversity and skilled in the ways of survival. She is brilliant and beautiful, tough and innocent, a natural-born artist and an intuitive naturalist, a scapegoat and something close to a superhero.

That’s a lot. Edgar-Jones has the good sense — or perhaps the brazen audacity — to play Kya as a fairly normal person who finds herself in circumstances that it would be an understatement to describe as improbable. Kya lives most of her life outside of human society, amid the flora and fauna of the marsh, and sometimes she resembles the feral creature the townspeople imagine her to be. Mostly, though, she seems like a skeptical, practical-minded young woman who wants to be left alone, except when she doesn’t.

Kya attracts the attention of two young men. One, a dreamy, blue-eyed fisherman’s son named Tate (Taylor John Smith), who shares her love of shells, feathers and the creatures associated with them. Companions in childhood, they become sweethearts as teenagers, until Tate goes off to college, and Kya gets mixed up with Chase (Harris Dickinson), a handsome cad whose dead body is eventually found at the bottom of a fire tower deep in the marshlands.

Eventually but also right at the beginning. The movie begins with Chase’s death, in October, 1969. Kya is charged with murder, and her trial alternates with the story of her life up until that point. Her mother (Ahna O’Reilly) and siblings flee the violence of an abusive, alcoholic father (Garret Dillahunt), who eventually takes off too, leaving Kya on her own in possession of a metal motorboat, a fixer-upper with a screened-in porch and a curious and creative spirit.

“Where the Crawdads Sing” takes place in the ’50s and ’60s, which on the evidence of the film were uneventful decades in America, especially the American South. Kya’s hermit-like existence — she attends school for one day, doesn’t learn to read until Tate teaches her and has no radio or television — feels a bit like an alibi for the film’s detachment from history. The local store where she sells mussels and gases up her boat is run by a Black couple, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt), who nurture and protect her and seem to have no problems (or children) of their own.

Kya’s outsider status — bolstered by the presence of David Strathairn as her Atticus Finch-like defense attorney — gives the movie a notion of social concern. Equally faint is the hint of Southern Gothic that sometimes perfumes the swampy air. But for a story about sex, murder, family secrets and class resentments, the temperature is awfully mild, as if a Tennessee Williams play had been sent to Nicholas Sparks for a rewrite.

Where the Crawdads Sing Rated PG-13. Wild but tame. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Andy Serkis, the star of the earlier “Planet of the Apes” movies, and Owen Teague, the new lead, discuss the latest film in the franchise , “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.”

The HBO series “The Sympathizer” is not just a good story, it’s a sharp piece of criticism on Vietnam war movies, our critic writes .

In “Dark Matter,” the new Apple TV+ techno-thriller, a portal to parallel realities allows people to visit new worlds and revisit their own past decisions .

The tennis movie “Challengers” comes to an abrupt stop midmatch, so we don’t know who won. Does that matter? Our critics have thoughts .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime and Hulu to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

an image, when javascript is unavailable

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Review: The Bestselling Novel Turned Into a Compelling Wild-Child Tale

Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kya, the venerable Marsh Girl, in a mystery as dark as it is romantic.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ Review: An Accomplished Pressure-Cooker Thriller That’s Like a Tarantino-Fueled Noir, 30 Years Later 5 days ago
‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: The Franchise Essentially Reboots with a Tale of Survival Set — At Last — in the Ape-Ruled Future 6 days ago
Restored and Rereleased, the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Is Revealed to Be the Joyful Documentary It Always Was 1 week ago

Sometimes a movie will turn softer than you thought it would — more sunny and upbeat and romantic, with a happier ending. Then there’s the kind of movie that turns darker than you expect, with an ominous undertow and an ending that kicks you in the shins. “ Where the Crawdads Sing ” is the rare movie that conforms to both those dynamics at once.

Adapted from Delia Owens ’ debut novel, which has sold 12 million copies since it was published in 2018, the movie is about a young woman whose identity is mired in physical and spiritual harshness. Kya Clark ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ) has grown up all by herself in a shack on a marshy bayou outside Barkley Cove, N.C. When we meet her, it’s 1969 and she’s being put on trial for murder. A young man who Kya was involved with has fallen to his death from a six-story fire tower. Was foul play involved? If so, was Kya the culprit? The local law enforcers don’t seem too interested in evidence. They’ve targeted Kya, who is known by the locals as Marsh Girl. For most of her life, she has been a scary local legend — the scandalous wild child, the wolf girl, the uncivilized outsider. Now, perhaps, she’s become a scapegoat.

The film then flashes back to 1953, when Kya is about 10 (and played by the feisty Jojo Regina), and her life unfolds as the redneck version of a Dickensian nightmare, with a father (Garret Dillahunt) who’s a violent abuser, a mother (Ahna O’Reilly) who abandons her, and a brother who soon follows. Kya is left with Pa, who retains his cruel ways (when a letter arrives from her mother, he burns it right in front of her), though he eases up on the beatings. Barefoot and undernourished, she tries to go to school and lasts one day; the taunting of the other kids sends her packing. Pa himself soon ditches Kya, leaving the girl to raise herself in that marshland shack.

Popular on Variety

All very dark. Yet with these stark currents in place, “Where the Crawdads Sing” segues into episodes with Kya as a teenager and young woman, and for a while the film seems to turn into a kind of badlands YA reverie. Kya may have a past filled with torment, but on her own she’s free — to do what she likes, to find innovative ways to survive (she digs up mussels at dawn and sells them to the Black proprietors of a local general store, played by Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr., who become her caretakers in town), and to chart her own destiny.

You’d expect someone known as Marsh Girl to have a few rough edges. Remember Jodie Foster’s feral backwoods ragamuffin in “Nell”? (She, too, was from North Carolina.) Yet Kya, for a wild child, is pretty refined, with thick flowy hair parted in the middle, a wardrobe of billowy rustic dresses, and a way of speaking that makes her sound like she grew up as the daughter of a couple of English teachers. (Unlike just about everyone else in the movie, she lacks even a hint of a drawl.) She does watercolor drawings of the seashells in the marshland, and her gift for making art is singular. She’s like Huck Finn meets Pippi Longstocking by way of Alanis Morissette.

The English actor Daisy Edgar-Jones, who has mostly worked on television (“Normal People,” “War of the Worlds”), has a doleful, earnest-eyed sensuality reminiscent of the quality that Alana Haim brought to “Licorice Pizza.” She gives Kya a quiet surface but makes her wily and vibrantly poised — which isn’t necessarily wrong , but it cuts against (and maybe reveals) our own prejudices, putting the audience in the position of thinking that someone known as Marsh Girl might not come off as quite this self-possessed. Kya meets a local boy, Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith), who has the look of a preppie dreamboat and teaches her, out of the goodness of his heart, to read and write. It looks like the two are falling in love, at least until it’s time for him to go off to college in Raleigh. Despite his protestations of devotion, Kya knows that he’s not coming back.

You could say that “Where the Crawdads Sing” starts out stormy and threatening, then turns romantic and effusive, then turns foreboding again. Yet that wouldn’t express the way the film’s light and dark tones work together. The movie, written by Lucy Alibar (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”) and directed by Olivia Newman with a confidence and visual vivacity that carry you along (the lusciously crisp cinematography is by Polly Morgan), turns out to be a myth of resilience. It’s Kya’s story, and in her furtive way she keeps undermining the audience’s perceptions about her.

The scenes of Kya’s murder trial are fascinating, because they’re not staged with the usual courtroom-movie cleverness. Kya is defended by Tim Milton ( David Strathairn ), who knew her as a girl and has come out of retirement to see justice done. In his linen suits, with his Southern-gentleman logic, he demolishes one witness after another, but mostly because there isn’t much of a case against Kya. The fellow she’s accused of killing, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), is the one she took up with after Tate abandoned her, and he’s a sketchier shade of preppie player, with a brusque manner that is less than trustworthy. He keeps her separate from his classy friends in town (at one point we learn why), and his scoundrel tendencies just mount from there. Did she have a motive for foul play?

“Where the Crawdads Sing” is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women’s power and independence in a world crushed under by masculine will. The movie has a lot of elements that will remind you of other films, like “The Man in the Moon,” the 1991 drama starring Reese Witherspoon (who is one of the producers here). But they combine in an original way. The ending is a genuine jaw-dropper, and while I wouldn’t go near revealing it, I’ll just say that this is a movie about fighting back against male intransigence that has the courage of its outsider spirit.

Reviewed at Museum of Modern Art, July 11, 2022. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 125 MIN.

Production: A Sony Pictures Releasing release of a 3000 Pictures production. Producers: Reese Witherspoon, Lauren Neustadter. Executive producers: Rhonda Fehr, Betsy Danbury.
Crew: Director: Olivia Newman. Screenplay: Lucy Alibar. Camera: Polly Morgan. Editor: Alan Edward Bell. Music: Mychael Danna.
With: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr., David Strathairn, Jayson Warner Smith, Garret Dillahunt, Ahna O’Reilly, Eric Ladin.

More From Our Brands

Lucy liu, padma lakshmi, saweetie and more celebrate asian excellence at 2024 gold house gala, a famed disney imagineer’s former socal retreat can be yours for $3 million, ted leonsis plans ‘credible and strong’ new offer for nationals, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, rings of power: sauron is a master of disguise in first season 2 trailer — get the release date, verify it's you, please log in.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

What's the Tomatometer®?
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening this week
Top box office
Coming soon to theaters
Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

Fandango at Home
Netflix streaming
Prime Video
Most popular streaming movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Link to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
The Fall Guy Link to The Fall Guy
The Last Stop in Yuma County Link to The Last Stop in Yuma County

New TV Tonight

Interview With the Vampire: Season 2
Spacey Unmasked: Season 1
After the Flood: Season 1
Bridgerton: Season 3
Outer Range: Season 2
The Big Cigar: Season 1
Harry Wild: Season 3
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Season 11.1
RuPaul's Drag Race: All Stars: Season 9
The Killing Kind: Season 1

Where the Crawdads Sing Reviews

it unfortunately runs the original story through the Hollywood machine, rendering it a surface-level and boilerplate experience that dilutes the emotional profundity of its source material. All the while being a borderline unbearable snooze fest.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

No doubt Alibar and Newman are just keeping as close as possible to the book. It is very much to their credit that they have committed so totally to giving the fans what they want without resorting to cheap fan service.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 31, 2023

Where the Crawdads Sing makes for a decent if generic coming-of-age story and a bland murder mystery.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 10, 2023

Try as it might, Where the Crawdads Sing amounts to nothing more than a shallow tale of otherness told through the lens of the prettiest, cleanest marsh girl you’ve ever seen.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

A solid interesting idea with a fantastic performance from Daisy really makes the film from being average!

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The all-female team of director Olivia Newman, screenwriter Lucy Alibar, and producer Reese Witherspoon do a tremendous job of painting a seductive small-town feel to a mystery thriller that should be anything but that.

Sanitized of any elements that could make this a marshy murder, Where The Crawdads Sing is a return to the type of films one would find in the Nicholas Sparksesque cinematic universe.

With no reason to fear for her safety, the bulk of the film feels like a soap opera.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 3, 2023

Where the Crawdads Sing feels like a novel truly coming to life. The scripting, the dialogue, the scenery choices, the score, has it all of the pieces to make you feel its great pacing & progression. The story may be harsh but its all the more encouraging

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 1, 2023

An old-school murder mystery primarily told as a courtroom drama, the paperback adaptation entertains from start to finish.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 13, 2022

The book might have been a phenomenon, however the film lacks “the grits” of the original text. Sadly Where The Crawdads Sing becomes bogged down in courtroom drama tropes to truly sing in its own right.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 13, 2022

…eventually settles for a fairly conventional Southern Gothic narrative with several plot points posted missing but a strong self-empowerment education message…

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 7, 2022

Where the Crawdads Sing is a beautifully haunting story of one girl's quiet resilience in a film that floats across multiple genres: thriller, romance and, ultimately, survival story.

Full Review | Oct 19, 2022

"Where the Crawdads Sing" is an imperfect but captivating drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 10, 2022

Mellifluous but never cheesy, the film seeks effective and healing tears for fans of this kind of fare, and treks through territory that isn't too minor. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Oct 3, 2022

The PG-13-ness of Where the Crawdads Sing buffs every rough edge off this story—the abuse, the abandonment, the betrayal, the sex, and even the alleged murder. It would be better off as trash.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 3, 2022

A coming-of-age story and murder mystery about a young naturalist living in the marshes who has to find out who she can truly trust.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 30, 2022

Daisy Edgar-Jones dominates this role, she has the gift of reflecting any feeling without practically raising an eyebrow. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2022

Where the Crawdads Sing isn’t terrible because it’s a romantic drama — it’s terrible because it’s terrible.

Full Review | Sep 29, 2022

Edgar-Jones’ easygoing allure isn’t enough to bind Where the Crawdads Sing together, though, leaving the film a generic, dull outing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 27, 2022

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

User Ratings
External Reviews
Metacritic Reviews
Full Cast and Crew
Release Dates
Official Sites
Company Credits
Filming & Production
Technical Specs
Plot Summary
Plot Keywords
Parents Guide

Did You Know?

Crazy Credits
Alternate Versions
Connections
Soundtracks

Photo & Video

Photo Gallery
Trailers and Videos

Where the Crawdads Sing review – Daisy Edgar-Jones wasted in terrible southern Gothic schmaltz

Normal People star deserved a better Hollywood debut than this solemnly ridiculous film and its outrageously evasive cheat ending

D aisy Edgar-Jones was a lockdown smash for her excellent performance in the BBC’s Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People , and she deserved better for her Hollywood debut than this uncompromisingly terrible southern gothic schmaltzer based on the humungous US bestseller by Delia Owens. It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect. Defending her is David Strathairn as the white-suited decent liberal lawyer and it is at this stage that this film plays like an all-white reboot of To Kill a Mockingbird with Edgar-Jones somehow getting to play Scout and Tom Robinson at the same time. And the big twist ending is an outrageously evasive cheat.

The scene is the beautiful and dangerous marshland of North Carolina in the 50s and 60s, a place “where the crawdads sing”; crawdads being crayfish that apparently sing metaphorically, doing their crayfish thing when no human beings are around. Edgar-Jones plays Kya, a young woman who has basically raised herself in a remote shack (there is only the tiniest bit of tastefully restrained five-string banjo picking on the soundtrack). She’s had to learn to survive when her drunken and violent Pa (Garret Dillahunt) drove Kya’s mother away after years of domestic abuse; her siblings fled and Pa finally keeled over. So as a teenager Kya is basically on her own, making a living by selling freshwater mussels to the local store, roaming wild and free on the wetlands in her outboard motorboat and drawing pictures of the local flora and fauna with her amazing untrained artistic talent.

Kya is subject to much paranoid misogynistic abuse from the local townsfolk, who are also racist to her only allies: the black store-owners played by Sterling Macer Jr and Michael Hyatt. But two very similar-looking local blond hunks fall in love with Kya. One is a decent young fellow called Tate (Taylor John Smith) who is just about to go away to study at Chapel Hill; she does a bit of kissing with Tate while the lakewater sploshes around them, like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. The other guy is boorish high school quarterback Chase (Harris Dickinson), whose dead body is found in the marsh, just underneath the fire tower. Kya is arrested for his murder. She pleads not guilty. So was Chase’s death an accident? Or did someone else kill him?

And so the drama drones on and on and on, leaving us to wonder, with increasing urgency … when, oh when, are we going to get the crucial flashback to which we are surely entitled? The scene when the film shows us, on screen, moment-by-moment, what actually happened, and what responsibility the participants actually have. Well, suffice it to say that what we get is a hilarious and ridiculous cop-out, a cakeist twist that left me yearning for the gators gliding around in the marsh to chomp down on everyone involved.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Drama films
Film adaptations
Crime films

Most viewed

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Daisy edgar-jones in ‘where the crawdads sing’: film review.

A young woman raised in the North Carolina marshes becomes the subject of investigation after a grisly murder in this film adaptation of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

Share this article on Facebook
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Flipboard
Share this article on Email
Show additional share options
Share this article on Linkedin
Share this article on Pinit
Share this article on Reddit
Share this article on Tumblr
Share this article on Whatsapp
Share this article on Print
Share this article on Comment

Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING.

Where the Crawdads Sing is the kind of tedious moral fantasy that fuels America’s misguided idealism. It’s an attempt at a complex tale about rejection, difference and survival. But the film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

Directed by Olivia Newman ( First Match ), the film adaptation of Delia Owens’ popular and controversial novel of the same name tells the remarkable tale of a shy, reclusive girl raised in the marshes of North Carolina who finds herself embroiled in a grisly police investigation. Her name is Kya ( Daisy Edgar-Jones of Normal People , Fresh and Under the Banner of Heaven ), but to those in the neighboring town, whose residents abhor her, she is known simply as “Marsh Girl.” The account of her life is remarkable because it requires such a powerful suspension of disbelief, a complete abandonment of logic and total submission to the workaday beats of this story.

Full credits

Distributor: Sony Pictures Production company: 3000 Pictures Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer, Jr., David Strathairn Director: Olivia Newman Screenwriter: Lucy Alibar Based upon the novel by: Delia Owens Producer: Reese Witherspoon, Lauren Neustadter Executive producers: Rhonda Fehr, Betsy Danbury Director of photography: Polly Morgan Production designer: Sue Chan Costume designer: Mirren Gordon-Crozier Editor: Alan Edward Bell Composer: Mychael Danna Casting director: David Rubin

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘supergirl’ movie lands june 2026 release in theaters, ‘megalopolis’ executive producer responds to report that francis ford coppola kissed extras on set, ‘the second act’ review: lea seydoux stars in quentin dupieux’s funny, button-pushing cannes opener, reese witherspoon, will ferrell battle over wedding venue in ‘you’re cordially invited’ trailer, gloria stroock, ‘mcmillan & wife’ and ‘fun with dick and jane’ actress, dies at 99, greta gerwig calls cannes a “house of worship” as fest kicks off.

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

Where the Crawdads Sing Eats Itself into Nothingness

In a perfect vacuum, you probably wouldn’t guess that Where the Crawdads Sing is based on a runaway publishing phenomenon, a book that has sold more than 12 million copies in just a few years. One doesn’t have to have loved Delia Owens’s debut novel to see why it has appealed to countless readers. Part murder mystery, part swoony romance, part cornpone coming-of-age tale, it’s an atmospheric and gleefully overheated melodrama, the kind of book that might make you tear up even as you curse its (many, many) shortcomings. The movie is resolutely faithful to the incidents of the novel, but it doesn’t seem particularly interested in standing on its own, in being a movie . It feels like an illustration more than an adaptation.

The story of Kya Clark, a young girl abandoned by her destitute family and forced to survive on her own in a remote corner of the North Carolina wilderness, the film starts off (much like the book) with a murder investigation and then flashes back to her life. The body of a man, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), has been found in the woods, and suspicion has settled on Kya (played as an adult by Daisy Edgar-Jones), a loner known to much of the town as “the Marsh Girl.” Taking up the case is a kindly local retired lawyer (played by a much-needed David Strathairn), who believes that Kya has been accused not because of any actual evidence against her, but because she’s been an outcast all her life, ridiculed and hated for years by the townsfolk as some kind of crazy, uncivilized brute.

As we go through Kya’s earlier years, we see a childhood defined by solitude — her mother and her siblings all leave their abusive father one by one, and dad himself (Garret Dillahunt) eventually disappears, leaving Kya alone in the family’s run-down shack on the edge of the marsh. As she grows up, Kya is romanced by a couple of blandly handsome two by fours — nerdy-nice Tate (played by Taylor John Smith as a grown-up) who shares her obsession with nature but then abandons her, and then local rich-boy Chase, who seems fascinated by her but clearly has little interest in a real relationship. We’re supposed to like one and dislike the other, but both Tate and Chase are so underdeveloped that it’s initially hard to feel much of anything for either. They barely register as people. Smith does little but stare lovingly, and Dickinson (who has, to be fair, distinguished himself in previous roles) brings a dash of snotty entitlement to Chase, but not much else.

The best thing about both novel and movie is Kya herself, a submerged character who finds solace and companionship in nature, and who, never having lived anything resembling a normal life around other people, doesn’t quite know what to do with her emotions. As the young Marsh Girl, Jojo Regina is quite moving; your heart goes out to her when a character reads out the local school lunch menu as a way of enticing the impoverished Kya to attend class. It’s a tough balance, to present a child as being both feisty and vulnerable without going overboard into schmaltzy pathos, and the film handles that particular challenge fairly well. As the grown-up Kya, Edgar-Jones is perhaps best at conveying this young woman’s wounded inner life; that speaks to the actress’s talents. However, she never really feels like someone who emerged from this world, but rather one who was dropped into it; that speaks to the clunky filmmaking.

It’s kind of a shock to find the movie version of Crawdads so lacking in atmosphere, as you’d think that’d be the one thing it would nail. Not the least because that lies at the heart of the book’s appeal: Owens spends pages describing the rough, wild, primeval world in which Kya lives, and she convincingly presents the girl as a part of the natural order of this untouched world. At various points, Kya sees herself reflected in the behavior of wild turkeys, snow geese, fireflies, seagulls, and more. She calls herself a seashell and later on finds friendship in Sunday Justice, the jailhouse cat. Where the Crawdads Sing is a book that drips with atmosphere and environmental detail, which enhance our understanding of the protagonist — and help justify some of the story’s more dramatic turns. Owens is herself a retired wildlife biologist who had previously written a number of nature books before turning to fiction. It’s no surprise that her novel works best as an extension of her prior work.

By contrast, the film’s director, Olivia Newman, presents the marsh as a postcard-pretty backdrop, a mostly distant and at times surprisingly calm and orderly space. There’s little sense of wildness, of unpredictability or abandon. Readers will of course often imagine settings differently than film adaptations, but that’s not the problem here. Onscreen, the marsh just never really registers as any kind of place, and it certainly doesn’t register as a spiritual canvas for Kya’s journey. (At times, I wondered if some of the landscape shots might actually have been green-screened in.) Even the fact that Kya has spent much of her life drawing the wildlife of the region – which ultimately plays a huge role in who she becomes – doesn’t come into play until relatively late in the film. None of these would necessarily be problems if the film weren’t otherwise so faithful to the book’s narrative.

This is the challenge of literary condensation. The murder investigation and the ensuing courtroom drama are the least compelling parts of Owens’s novel, there mostly as a loose framing device to tell Kya’s life story. Indeed, she saves the bulk of the trial for the back half of the book, and then breezes by the suspense and the procedural back-and-forth, presumably because she’s not interested in all that. (Spoiler alert: She’s more interested in the twist she springs in her final pages – a twist that also has some eerie echoes of a real-life murder investigation in Zambia that Owens and her ex-husband are reportedly embroiled in, but that’s a whole other crazy story .)

That leaves the movie with a genre-friendly structure, but almost nothing to populate it with. As a result, for much of Where the Crawdads Sing , we’re left watching a not-very interesting and all-but predetermined trial, with little suspense or surprise. We don’t ever really see what the prosecution’s case is against Kya. (If you read the book, you’d have some sense of it, but even there, it’s cursory and half-baked.) It’s a classic Catch-22: The film, to stay true to its wildly popular source material, has to focus on the case, which in turn leaves the picture little room to breathe, to let the audience bask in the atmosphere of this fascinating milieu… which is at least partly why the source material was so wildly popular in the first place. So, forget the crawdads, the turkeys, the fireflies, the seashells, and the snow geese. Forget even the jailhouse cat. The movie is a snake that eats itself.

More Movie Reviews

Unfortunately, Madame Web Is Bad in a Boring Way
The Iron Claw Should Be Even Sadder
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Lacks the Power of Its Predecessors
movie review
where the crawdads sing
daisy edgar-jones
harris dickinson
olivia newman
delia owens

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

Lower case letters (a-z)
Upper case letters (A-Z)
Numbers (0-9)
Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Screen Rant

Where the crawdads sing review: gorgeous visuals clash with storytelling issues.

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

10 Movie Franchises Where The First Film Is The Best One

Anya taylor-joy's dune 2 role overshadows her $1.3 billion movie franchise with just 30 seconds of screentime, $494 million hit is the best non-disney animated movie according to rotten tomatoes.

Book-to-movie adaptations can be notoriously difficult to nail. Get things right, and fans of the source material will sing its praises. Get things wrong, though, and the movie will become infamous. In the case of Where the Crawdads Sing , Olivia Newman's adaptation of Delia Owens' best-selling novel, there is a very good chance it will find itself in the former category when it arrives in theaters. The gorgeously-shot movie is incredibly faithful to the book and will no doubt delight those who have eagerly devoured its pages. However, as a movie, Where the Crawdads Sing stumbles a bit in its transition from page to screen, though it is aided by a great lead performance.

Picking up in 1969, the sleepy town of Barkley Cove, North Carolina is shaken by the apparent murder of golden boy Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson). There is a shocking lack of evidence found at the crime scene, but rumors have already put a suspect on trial: The famed "Marsh Girl," a Barkley Cove legend who has been the subject of scorn for years. In reality, the Marsh Girl is Kya Clark ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ), a shy girl with a deep passion for nature. Turning back the clock several years, Where the Crawdads Sing digs into Kya's life, her relationship with the surrounding marsh, and whether she might be involved in Chase's untimely demise.

Related: Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris Review: Lesley Manville Shines In Wholesome 1950s Tale

Where the Crawdads Sing has been a book club favorite for years now, and as a result, its adaptation has some high expectations attached. Luckily, it is clear from almost the very beginning that Newman and her team have nothing but the utmost respect for the source material. Lucy Alibar has penned a screenplay that is filled with numerous details and lines lifted straight from the book, making this one of the most faithful adaptations in recent memory. To be sure, Where the Crawdads Sing makes some adjustments here and there, but they are relatively small. By filming on location, Newman is able to make the most of actual marshes in the South, and cinematographer Polly Morgan does an excellent job at showcasing these beautiful natural landscapes. In many ways, Where the Crawdads Sing really brings Kya's world to life in vivid fashion, including through the carefully detailed work of production designer Sue Chan.

However, there are places where the movie's devotion to the book causes it to run aground. Literally, in a way, as Where the Crawdads Sing holds some pacing issues. There are key moments in Kya's murder trial that should be filled with tension and suspense; instead, they lack the necessary urgency. On the specific topic of the trial, the movie suffers early on from jarring cuts between the past and the present. These get better as Chase's prominence in the plot increases, but the first portion of Where the Crawdads Sing can't seem to find a suitable balance between Kya's early life and her uneasy future. Additionally, in its attempt to bring as many book moments to life as possible, the movie finds itself grappling with a few awkward moments that, while reading fine on the page, don't exactly translate well to a visual medium.

Where the Crawdads Sing 's greatest strength is Edgar-Jones (and Jojo Regina, who plays a younger Kya). Kya is a unique main character and Edgar-Jones does a great job in bringing her to life. Whether it is by expressing delighted wonderment over a gifted feather or retreating in on herself in the face of a potential death sentence, Edgar-Jones plays all sides of Kya with ease. Taylor John Smith takes on the pivotal role of Tate, Kya's first true friend. Armed with a kind smile and earnest disposition, Smith possesses all the charms Tate should have, and his chemistry with Edgar-Jones further sells their bond. As the more complicated Chase, Dickinson does a good job in gradually exposing the kind of man his character really is. Special credit should be given to Michael Hyatt and Sterling Mercer Jr. as Mabel and Jumpin, respectively; though their roles remain as sadly underwritten as they are in the book, they bring real heart to each and every one of their scenes.

Where the Crawdads Sing will surely appease fans of the book, and on some level, its adherence to the source material is to be commended. It is very clear the filmmaking team respects and appreciates the book. However, that passion doesn't entirely hide the cracks that emerge when transferring a story from one medium to another. The production itself and Edgar-Jones do much to bring this world to brilliant life. Ultimately, though, Where the Crawdads Sing is unable to soar like the birds Kya admires so much.

More: Watch The Where The Crawdads Sing Trailer

Where the Crawdads Sing releases in theaters Friday, July 15. It is 125 minutes long and rated PG-13 for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault.

Our Rating:

Movie Reviews
2.5 star movies

Review: ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is the latest literary sensation turned ho-hum movie

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Taylor John Smith in "Where the Crawdads Sing."

Show more sharing options
Copy Link URL Copied!

In 2018, retired zoologist Delia Owens, the author of the bestselling 1984 memoir “Cry of the Kalahari,” published her first novel at the age of 69. “Where the Crawdads Sing” is set on the North Carolina coast in the 1950s and ’60s, threading romance and murder mystery through the life story of a young, isolated woman, Kya, who grows up abandoned in the marsh. The story is a bit far-fetched, the characterizations broad, but there’s a beauty in Owens’ description of Kya’s relationship to the natural world. Her derisive nickname, “the Marsh Girl,” ultimately becomes her strength.

“Where the Crawdads Sing” has become a legitimate publishing phenomenon, one of the bestselling books of all time, despite a controversy bubbling in Owens’ past — a connection to the killing of a suspected animal poacher in Zambia. Reese Witherspoon bestowed the book with her book club blessing, and as she has done with other titles from her club, like “Big Little Lies,” Witherspoon has produced the film adaptation of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” written by Lucy Alibar, directed by Olivia Newman, and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as the heroine, Kya.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

The film is easily slotted into the Southern gothic courtroom drama sub-genre — it’s like “A Time to Kill” with a feminine touch. While the nature of adaptation requires compression and elision, the film dutifully tells the story that fans of the book will turn out to see brought to life on the big screen. But in checking off all the plot points, the movie version loses what makes the book work, which is the time we spend with Kya.

Kya is a tricky protagonist whose life story requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Abandoned by her mother (Ahna O’Reilly) and siblings escaping the drunken abuse of her father (Garret Dillahunt), who later disappears, young Kya (Jojo Regina) survives on her own, selling mussels to the proprietor of the local bait and tackle shop, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.). His wife, Mabel (Michael Hyatt), takes pity on Kya and offers her some clothes and food donations, but it’s an exceedingly tough existence, something that the film does not manage to fully convey.

As a teen, Kya forms a friendship with a local boy, Tate (Taylor John Smith), who teaches her to read, and though their relationship turns romantic, he ultimately leaves her for college. Abandoned once again, she seeks companionship with popular local cad Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson). It’s his death, from a fall at the rickety fire tower, that sees Kya on trial in the town of Barkley Cove, which ultimately becomes a referendum on how she’s been harshly judged over the years by the townspeople.

The only reason Kya works in the book is the amount of time the reader spends with her in the marsh, understanding the tactics she uses to get by, and getting to know the natural world in the way that she does, observing the patterns and life cycles of animals, insects, and plants. The deep knowledge of her environment and ad-hoc education from Tate helps Kya overcome poverty, as she publishes illustrated books of local shells, plants, and birds. But in the film, which sacrifices getting to know her in order to prioritize the more scandal-driven twists and turns, Kya comes off as somewhat silly, a bit easy to laugh at in her naiveté and guilelessness.

There’s also the matter of plausibility, and the shininess with which this rough, wild world has been rendered by Newman and cinematographer Polly Morgan. The marsh (shot on location in Louisiana) is captured with a crisp, if perfunctory beauty, but it’s hard to buy English rose Edgar-Jones in her crisp blouses and clean jeans as the near-feral naturalist who has been brutally cast out by society. Everything’s just too pretty, a Disneyland version of the marsh.

The whole world feels sanded-down and spit-shined within an inch of its life, lacking any grime or grit that might make this feel authentic, and that extends to the storytelling as well. It feels exceedingly rushed, as the actors hit their marks and deliver their monologues with a sense of obligation to moving the plot along rather than developing character. Hyatt, as Mabel, and David Strathairn, who plays Kya’s lawyer, Tom Milton, are the only actors who deliver grounded performances that feel like real people — everyone else feels like a two-dimensional version of an archetype spouting the necessary backstory or subtext to keep the plot churning forward.

Though it is faithful, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is lacking the essential character and storytelling connective tissue that makes a story like this work — an adaptation such as this cannot survive on plot alone.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

'Where the Crawdads Sing'

Rating: PG-13, for sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes Playing: In general release July 15

Review: In ‘Wildcat,’ director Ethan Hawke — and daughter Maya — bring a literary life to screen

May 3, 2024

Colm Tóibín’s latest tale is bound together by the tension between secrecy and revelation

Ultimate Hollywood Bookshelf essay illustration for Julia Phillips' book "You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again"

Hollywood’s bravest and most foolhardy memoir wasn’t written by a movie star

April 8, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Miranda July, with short curly brown hair and a distressed denim jacket, looks into the camera.

Miranda July is widening and expanding women’s lives with her new novel: ‘Fiction is my superpower’

May 14, 2024

Jerry Seinfeld in a blue robe and graduation cap standing behind a wooden podium that says "Duke"

Entertainment & Arts

What’s the deal with Jerry Seinfeld? His Duke University address sparks student walkout

May 13, 2024

On a small set in Venice, legendary horrormeister Roger Corman films one of dozens of introductions he was to do into the night for an AMC horror series to run in October.

Roger Corman, independent cinema pioneer and king of B movies, dead at 98

May 11, 2024

Company Town

Shari Redstone was poised to make Paramount a Hollywood comeback story. What happened?

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Review: The Literary Sensation Becomes a Glossy Summer Popcorn Movie

David ehrlich.

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

We may never know the full truth behind Delia Owens’ checkered past as a conservationist — which almost certainly seem to include a militant, white savior-minded approach to policing Zambian wildlife preserves, and may also extend to being a “co-conspirator and accessory” to murder — but the secret to the “ Where the Crawdads Sing ” author’s success is now as obvious as her plotting, even to those of us who had never heard of the runaway bestseller until Taylor Swift invented it a few short weeks ago. Olivia Newman’s (“First Match”) slick and glossy beach read of a movie adaptation brings it all right to the surface. Which is just as well, because the surface is the only layer this movie has.

Yes, this is an expertly contrived melodrama about defiance in the face of abandonment, and sure, it’s also a faintly self-exonerating caricature of a natural woman unspoiled by Western society. But underneath the story’s humid romance with Carolina marshland, and behind its Hollywood-ready façade of backwater Americana, “Where the Crawdads Sing” is really just a swampy riff on “Pygmalion,” with Eliza Doolittle reimagined as a semi-feral outsider who’s obviously the hottest girl in town, but lives in almost complete isolation until the Zack Siler of Barkley Cove teachers her how to read and make out.

Streamlined from its source material with the help of a Lucy Aliber script that embraces the frothiness of Owens’ book while turning down the temperature of its florid, nature is my real mama narration, the film version of “Where the Crawdads Sing” is a lot more fun as a hothouse page-turner than it is as a soulful tale of feminine self-sufficiency. That it’s able to split the difference between Nicholas Sparks and “Nell” with any measure of believability is a testament to Daisy Edgar-Jones ’ careful performance as Kya Clark.

The youngest daughter of an abusive drunk, and the only member of her family who stayed in their remote North Carolina house until the day Pa died sometime in the 1950s, Kya’s childhood was spent watching the people who loved her leave one-by-one (she’s played as a child by Jojo Regina). On her own from an early age, and dehumanized into folklore by the “normal” people in town — especially the kids, who label her “Marsh Girl” and laugh her right back to the swamp when she shows up at school without shoes on — Kya is forced to survive by selling mussels to the nice Black couple who run the local store (Sterling Macer, Jr. as Jumpin, and Michael Hyatt as his wife Mabel).

Some years later she’ll be hauled down to the Barkley Cove jail and forced to stand trial for the murder of a pasty cad named Chase Andrews; it’s there, at the behest of the retired lawyer ( David Strathairn !) who takes her case out of the goodness of his heart, that Kya is finally compelled to share her life story for the first time, her voiceover guiding us through the past in snippets of evocatively overwrought prose that establish her connection to nature. “Marsh is a space of light,” she coos, “where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.” In a real time is a flat circle kind of twist, it often feels like Kya taught herself to write by reading all the other novels that have been canonized by Reese Witherspoon’s book club.

Of course, self-reliant and capable as Kya is, we soon learn that she learned her letters with the help of the square-jawed soft boy who grew up down the creek. The Dawson Leery to Kya’s Joey Potter, Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) is a kind-hearted soul who lost some family of his own, which might explain why he always remembered the orphaned girl who everyone else in Barkley Cove was eager to forget. In the summer before college, Tate starts leaving Kya supplies on a tree stump — as if he were filling a food trap for a wild animal — only to discover that the Marsh Girl has matured into a movie star. It’s a genuine credit to Newman’s handle on her film’s silly-serious tone that she allows Kya, who doesn’t have electricity or running water, to look like she’s blown all of her mussel money on Pantene Pro-V. Anyway, kissing ensues. Sometimes amid a slow-motion vortex of leaves.

Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) in Columbia Pictures' WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING.

But if Tate thinks the Marsh Girl will always be waiting for him (a girl can only go so far without shoes), he’s in for a rude awakening; once the word gets out that Kya is a total catch, she becomes an irresistible fetish object for the kind of fella who might have less honorable intentions. Enter our corpse-in-waiting, Mr. Chase Andrews. Played by a slithering but somewhat vulnerable Harris Dickinson , who looks so much like Taylor John Smith that his dark-haired character might as well be the blond Tate’s evil twin, Chase loves Kya like a backhanded compliment, and talks down to her even when he’s trying to get her top off. We know he won’t be around for long, but did he fall from that rickety fire tower, or was he pushed? Surely a girl like Kya, so desperate for someone who might not abandon her, wouldn’t kill the one person who hadn’t yet?

That framing device of a question looms in the background of a movie that is far less interested in how Chase dies than it is by how Kya is persecuted for it — by how the Marsh Girl has remained innocent despite a lifetime of prejudice. Shy without being sneaky, naive without seeming childlike, and in tune with nature without going full “raised by wolves” (though the jailhouse cat’s instant affinity for her is a little much), Edgar-Jones’ wide-eyed performance completely sells us on Kya’s reality as a survivor. Her soft voice and defensive posture lend the character a lilting interiority that holds this movie together across multiple timelines.

Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Columbia Pictures' WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING.

It’s a doubly impressive feat in an adaptation that’s often edited to feel like a two-hour montage, a nagging issue that leaves “Crawdads” a little off-key from its slippery first half to its inelegant coda (though only one early scene of young Kya and Tate yapping at each other from separate boats truly borders on “Bohemian Rhapsody” territory). It’s just a shame the story’s ultra-predictable ending is presented in a way that denies us the full potential of Edgar-Jones’ performance, as Newman opts for hair-raising inference over primal satisfaction.

To that same point, “Where the Crawdads Sing” works best when it embraces its own true nature as a popcorn movie. Newman seems to recognize that “and David Strathairn” are the three most beautiful words that can ever appear in the opening credits of a studio film, and she gives the actor the space he needs to stalk across a sweaty courtroom in a white suit and make us gasp along with the small crowd of people who’ve gathered to witness Kya’s trial. Dickinson textures Chase as well as the script will allow, but delights in the character’s inherent punchability so that the film’s central love triangle never loses it shape. If Jumpin and Mabel still betray the career-long criticism that Owens tends to infantilize her Black characters, Macer and Hyatt ground their roles in a quiet dignity that pushes back against how they may have been written on the page.

As a movie, “Where the Crawdads Sing” never seems worthy of the hullabaloo that continues to surround the book, but — much like its heroine — Newman’s adaptation finds just enough ways to endure.

Sony Pictures will release “Where the Crawdads Sing” in theaters on Friday, July 15.

Or browse by category:

Get the app
Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

Explaining the News to Our Kids

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Where the crawdads sing, common sense media reviewers.

Standout performances in uneven, trauma-filled adaptation.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Explores importance of nature, self-education, and

Kya is observant, a quick learner, a dedicated nat

Two of Kya's few friends are Jumpin' and his wife,

Children hear their father beating their mother an

Two love scenes: one quick, the other a bit longer

Insult language: "marsh girl," "White trash," "rat

High school- and college-age characters drink beer

Positive Messages

Explores importance of nature, self-education, and being a lifelong learner. Depicts the many reasons people need companionship and love. Also looks at the lasting impact of trauma and abandonment and the loneliness of isolation. Themes include empathy and perseverance.

Positive Role Models

Kya is observant, a quick learner, a dedicated naturalist. She's incredibly smart and talented. Tate is generous with his time and knowledge. He's smart and loves the marsh as much as Kya, but he also breaks her heart. Jumpin' and Mabel are selfless and helpful.

Diverse Representations

Two of Kya's few friends are Jumpin' and his wife, Mabel, the movie's only Black characters of note. They're kind, generous, loving to Kya. Although their involvement in Kya's life is less stereotypical than it was in the book, they can still be considered examples of the "magical Negro" cliché -- i.e., characters of color who exist solely to aid White protagonists. Kya herself is a self-educated "genius" who doesn't attend traditional school.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Children hear their father beating their mother and siblings. A woman with visible bruises leaves her family. Siblings who are similarly hurt also leave, one by one. A father slaps his young daughter. A dead body is shown a few times. Intimate-partner violence continues in the next generation when Kya's former boyfriend stalks her menacingly and commits sexual assault and attempts to rape her, calling her "his."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two love scenes: one quick, the other a bit longer. Both show men's bare chests and a woman's bare shoulders and back. Two different couples are shown flirting, holding hands, kissing. One couple is about to have sex but stop before it happens.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Insult language: "marsh girl," "White trash," "rat girl," "cooties." "Damn," "damn you," "Christ sakes," "whoring," "goddamn." A Black man is called "boy" by a younger White man.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

High school- and college-age characters drink beer. Adults drink at a restaurant. Kya's father drinks to excess and acts like he's self-medicating to treat unspecified mental illness.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Where the Crawdads Sing is a romantic mystery/drama based on Delia Owens' bestselling 2018 novel. It's set in the coastal marshes of 1950s-'60s North Carolina, where young Kya is dubbed "Marsh Girl" because she lives in near-complete isolation. As a young adult, Kya ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ), who doesn't trust the nearby townspeople, is accused of murder. Like the book, the film deals with heavy subjects, including child abandonment, domestic abuse, and sexual assault. The language is largely insults and uses of "damn" and "goddamn"; a White man also calls a Black man "boy." Violent scenes involve disturbing acts of intimate-partner abuse, child abuse, and sexual assault. A character is alcohol dependent and has an unspecified mental health condition. Kya experiences two pivotal romantic relationships, both of which include kissing and love scenes. The movie's depiction of two Black characters, while better than the book's, still plays into the "magical Negro" cliché, in which a character of color exists only to help a White main character. Issues related to trauma and isolation are threaded throughout the story, but so are the importance of nature, conservation, and education, giving parents and teens plenty to talk about after watching. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (26)
Kids say (35)

Based on 26 parent reviews

Excellent story but contains violence and sexual abuse

Great movie, for adults., what's the story.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING is based on the bestselling historical romantic mystery novel written by naturalist Delia Owens. Set in a fictional North Carolina coastal town, the story takes place in the 1950s and '60s. In 1952, a young Kya Clark (Jojo Regina) witnesses her abused mother hurriedly leave the family, with the rest of the children following in her footsteps. Alone with her father ( Garret Dillahunt ), who's physically abusive and alcohol-dependent, Kya grows used to being alone in the marsh where her family's cabin sits. When her father also leaves, Kya learns to fend for herself with a little help from empathetic general store owners Jumpin' (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt). As she gets older, Kya lasts literally one day at the public school before bullying kids chase the "Marsh Girl" away. Years later, local high schooler Tate Walker ( Taylor John Smith ) teaches a now teenage Kya ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ) to read and write. After Tate leaves for college, Kya starts a relationship with popular quarterback Chase Andrews ( Harris Dickinson ), wooed by his promises of marriage and stability. When Chase is found dead in the marsh in 1969, Kya is accused of murder and defended by a local attorney ( David Strathairn ) who believes the townsfolk should feel guilty for mistreating Kya.

Is It Any Good?

The beauty of the natural setting and the central love story aren't quite enough to save this adaptation from the slippery slope of melodrama, but Edgar-Jones gives a standout performance. The genre-bending page-to-screen drama is like a classic tragic romance set in the American South, with young Kya an almost Dickensian figure. The cruelties that young Kya must endure are nearly unwatchable: Her entire family abandons her, her father slaps her, the other kids taunt her. Later, audiences will cheer as Kya grows into a young woman who observes all the fauna and flora of the marsh with joy and admiration (and as the lovely and selfless Tate takes an interest in tutoring her and clearly falls in love). But Kya's bad luck ultimately continues, and she ends up not with brilliant scientist-in-training Tate but with predatory and deceitful Chase, who's more interested in conquest than true love.

Screenwriter Lucy Alibar's adaptation makes the murder case against Kya the framing device that spawns flashbacks to the romances, tragedies, and family drama. But, unlike the book, the movie version of Where the Crawdads Sing doesn't fully explore each of those aspects of the story. The court proceedings in particular don't explore the details that make the eventual revelations pack an extra punch. What director Olivia Newman does explore is the way that darkness lurks just beneath the lush landscape. For every feather or shell that Kya collects, there's an ugly secret, a foul rumor, a moment of abuse to witness. It's no wonder Kya prefers the marsh to the town, the kindness of Jumpin' and Mabel to the scrutiny of Chase's friends. Kya, like the animals she's observed her whole life, knows when to shrink into herself as a survival mechanism. And while the movie can be overly sentimental, there are some lovely sequences, usually between Edgar-Jones and Smith. It also has notable messages about the importance of nature, love, and treating the disenfranchised with respect and dignity.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Where the Crawdads Sing . Is it necessary to the story? Do different kinds of violence impact viewers differently?

How do trauma and substance use play a role in the story? What are some character strengths that Kya and Tate display? Who do you consider a role model ?

Discuss what role the setting plays in the movie. Why is nature so important to Kya?

If you've read the book, talk about any differences between the book and movie. What do you think about aspects of the book that the movie added or changed?

How does the movie treat sex and consent? Parents, talk to your teens about sex, consent, and sexual assault.

Movie Details

In theaters : July 15, 2022
On DVD or streaming : September 13, 2022
Cast : Daisy Edgar-Jones , Harris Dickinson , Taylor John Smith , Garret Dillahunt
Director : Olivia Newman
Inclusion Information : Female directors
Studio : Sony Pictures Entertainment
Genre : Drama
Topics : Book Characters , Science and Nature
Character Strengths : Empathy , Perseverance
Run time : 125 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault
Last updated : April 17, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Want personalized picks for your kids' age and interests?

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Fried Green Tomatoes

Sharp Objects

Thriller movies, drama movies that tug at the heartstrings, related topics.

Perseverance
Book Characters
Science and Nature

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

DVD & Streaming

Where the Crawdads Sing

Drama , Romance

Content Caution

In Theaters

July 15, 2022
Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya Clark; Taylor John Smith as Tate Walker; David Strathairn as Tom Milton; Harris Dickinson as Chase Andrews; Sterling Macer Jr. as Jumpin'; Michael Hyatt as Mabel; Garret Dillahunt as Pa

Home Release Date

September 6, 2022
Olivia Newman

Distributor

Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

She was born and raised in a swamp.

’Course, it’s the “raised” part that’s debatable. Kya Clark’s Pa was a man of heavy-drinking, heavy-fisted ways. Because of that, Ma and Kya’s siblings all left—one-by-one, in cuts and bruises—when she was but a little thing. And her Pa up and left not many years after.

So, at about the age of 8, Kya was called upon to raise herself in that little shack deep in the marsh where the crawdads sing. And being alone was a feeling so vast, it echoed. But she learned how to find things in the marsh to eat. And she dug up swampy mussels to trade at a nearby store for grits and gas and other necessities.

The store’s owners, Jumpin’ and Mable, looked out for her, best they could. They even gave her help in going to the local school to learn reading and writing. But it didn’t stick. The town kids called her Swamp Rat and Marsh Girl, and meanness drove her back to her familiar marshy world.

But there was always that longing, that desire to connect. And as Kya grew older (and prettier) some would turn their eyes in her direction without harsh words. A kind young man named Tate took the time to talk, and to teach her to read. And a popular, but not-as-kind towner named Chase Andrews taught her … other things.

Years later, though, when Chase was found dead in the swamp, many eyes turned in Kya’s direction. The town was certain who the responsible party was: the Marsh Girl!

How couldn’t it be? After all, Kya Clark was just some nasty young woman born in a swamp.

Positive Elements

In spite of all the hardships that little Kya endures, she actually grows to become an educated, kind-hearted young woman. Much of that growth comes through her own effort and desire to better herself. But a lot can be attributed to the people who were kind and giving to her—including Jumpin’, Mabel and Tate.

Tate, in particular, helps Kya out. He offers her his friendship and brings her books so that she can learn to read and learn about the marsh around her. Eventually, she uses the knowledge she’s acquired to catalog and draw the various plants and insects that populate her marsh.

Spiritual Elements

After Jumpin’ implores young Kya to be careful around townspeople, his wife, Mabel, pushes back with a quote from the book of Mathew: “Don’t say that in the Bible. ‘Do unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.’ Don’t say nothin’ about ‘Be careful.’”

Sexual Content

Kya’s first sexual interactions happen with Tate as their friendship blossoms into attraction. We see them hugging and kissing on a number of occasions. And that eventually leads to something more serious. Clothes are removed. A passionate make-out session ensues. We see some caressing, and the camera stays close. Bare backs and shoulders are visible; other areas are strategically covered. Before going too far, however, Tate backs off since he knows he’ll be going away to college soon. “I care about you too much,” he tells her. Elsewhere, he demonstrates that he doesn’t want to take advantage of her.

Much later we see them together again. There’s embracing, kissing and scattered clothes; and it’s implied they have sex. He asks her to marry him while they’re in bed together. She replies, “Aren’t we already?”

Kya’s sexual interactions with Chase are less romantic and respectful. He’s called a Tom Cat by someone because of how he chases and plays with town girls. And that’s reflected in his relationship with Kya. Chase is often aggressive, and he pushes Kya into situations she’s obviously uncomfortable with. There’s kissing and fondling (outside her clothes). They eventually have sex in bed (and it’s implied that it’s uncomfortable for her). He’s shown shirtless, while she’s still clothed from the waist up—though undergarments are obviously removed.

Later, it’s implied that they have an ongoing sex life—and he promises marriage—even though by now he’s also gotten married to another woman from town.

Violent Content

Kya’s dad is an angry drunk. We see him slap 6-year-old Kya so hard she flies off a small pier into the water. He also punches his wife in the face, and she collapses to the ground. Later we see Ma with a swollen face as she slips away from the house to run from him. We see the various siblings with bruises and cut lips before they run away.

Kya soon learns to placate Pa’s mood and stay out of sight as often as possible. He gives her an angry, but grudging, respect for those kinds of choices. But then he leaves as well.

Later, Chase ends up being something of a mirror image of Kya’s dad. He drinks and he gets violent when Kya refuses his advances. At one point he backhands her, punches her in the face and moves to rape her. But she’s older now and defends herself: She hits him back, kicking him and throwing rocks at him before getting away. We see her later with a cut and dark bruise on her face.

Chase and Tate engage in a scuffle in town. The two men punch and slap each other before being pulled apart.

Boys find a dead body in the swamp and the camera eyes the crumpled form. It’s determined he fell forty feet from a nearby fire tower.

We hear that Kya’s mother died from leukemia. An angry man smashes and tears his way through Kya’s small cabin.

Crude or Profane Language

There are a couple uses each of “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—” and “a–” and one s-word. God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a total of three times (with God being combined with “d–n” on one of those).

Drug and Alcohol Content

We see young Kya’s dad buy Jim Beam at the local store. He drinks it and passes out. And it’s implied that alcohol spurs other rages, too. We also see Chase and friends drink beer.

Other Negative Elements

We occasionally witness Southern racial attitudes of the 1950s and ’60s on display. A local government official talks down to Jumpin’, for instance, calling him a “boy.”

The fact is, both Tate and Chase treat Kya pretty badly. They both turn away from her because of pressure from family and friends to “avoid the Marsh Girl.” (Tate later apologizes for his thoughtless actions.)

Where the Crawdads Sing is a story and a movie of contrasts.

It’s part murder tale and court case, and equal part romance. It tells of a young woman who has become strong and self-sufficient in the face of loneliness and physical abuse. And it’s lovely—thanks in great part to the gentle character portrayal by lead Daisy Edgar-Jones—while at the same time containing sexuality and violence that many will find extremely uncomfortable.

In that sense this film about a young woman who thrives in her love of nature and her longing for connection is much like a wetland flower with soft, fragrant petals atop thorns you cannot help but feel.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

Latest Reviews

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Not Another Church Movie

Mother of the Bride

The Fall Guy

Weekly reviews straight to your inbox.

clock This article was published more than 1 year ago

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’: ‘Blue Lagoon’ meets ‘Murder, She Wrote’

Southern-fried whodunit/romance is based on Delia Owens’s 2018 best-selling novel

“I don’t know if there’s a dark side to nature,” says the budding-conservationist protagonist of “Where the Crawdads Sing.” “Just inventive ways to endure.”

That’s how Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones) sums up her views on the animal kingdom — and humanity — in this lyrical coming-of-age story (which also doubles as a murder mystery). First-time director Olivia Newman, adapting Delia Owens’s 2018 bestseller, paints a lush picture of Southern marshland, using large brushstrokes that sometimes recall a Nicholas Sparks melodrama. Yet underneath all the natural beauty lurks something dark indeed.

The film begins in 1969, with Louisiana filling in for the fictional coastal town of Barkley Cove, N.C. Police are investigating the death of a young man named Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) — the prime suspect being Kya, a recluse who has spent much of her young life living alone in the woods. Most townspeople call her “Marsh Girl” and know she had been romantically involved with Chase. They assume the worst of someone they’ve long thought of as a wild child. Fortunately for Kya, gentleman lawyer Tom Milton (David Strathairn) comes out of retirement to defend her.

As Kya tells her story to Tom, the “Crawdads” timeline shifts from the murder investigation to flashbacks of Kya’s troubled childhood. When she was little, Kya (Jojo Regina) stood by as her mother and, eventually, all her siblings ran away from home to escape their drunken, abusive father (Garret Dillahunt). The film’s title is taken from the advice of Kya’s big brother, Cody, who, as he leaves home, tells his 9-year-old sister where to hide when Pa comes looking for a punching bag.

In time, even Pa leaves. Yet there are people looking out for Kya. People like Jumpin’ and Mabel (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt), who run the local supply store, and, most crucially, people like Tate (Taylor John Smith), who befriends her, teaches her how to read and write, and gradually falls in love with her. “I didn’t know words could hold so much,” she tells him, before he, too, abandons her.

“Marsh is not swamp,” Kya narrates as the film begins. “Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.” But as much as “Crawdads” seems to rhapsodize about nature, this is a violent paradise that at times suggests a young adult drama directed by Werner Herzog. (Yes, that Werner Herzog.)

London-born Edgar-Jones (“Cold Feet”) convincingly portrays Kya’s haunted shyness, though she doesn’t really look like somebody you or I would shun: Even though she’s raised herself in the woods, her pastoral wardrobe is less feral child than, say, Anthropologie’s summer collection. As Kya’s contrasting young beaus, Dickinson and Smith look pretty much interchangeable, but each actor aptly conveys his respective role: brutal jock in the case of Chase, and sensitive scholar for Tate. With Strathairn’s gentle gravitas suggesting an elderly Atticus Finch, much of “Crawdads” seems like a misty-eyed look at an innocent American past. Not to spoil things, but that’s not exactly what plays out.

Screenwriter Lucy Alibar (“ Beasts of the Southern Wild ”) adapts the source material with a nod to the magic realism that characterized her Oscar-nominated screenplay for that 2012 drama, co-written with director Benh Zeitlin. But although set in a similarly rural environment and, like “Beasts,” revolving around a father and daughter, “Crawdads” is much more conventional, its tone shifting from young love to a small-town crime story. It’s Southern-fried “The Blue Lagoon” meets “Murder, She Wrote” — and topped off with a sprinkling of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

But there’s a more curious resonance with Owens’s own personal life. According to a recent Atlantic article, the “Crawdads” author is wanted for questioning in Zambia in connection with the 1995 killing of an alleged poacher — whose execution was captured on videotape and, the article suggests, may have been carried out by a member of Owens’s family. (There is no statute of limitations on murder in Zambia.)

One might wonder whether the fictional narrative of the beleaguered waif in a judgmental small town is Owens’s way of addressing something in her own past. If there’s an impulse to see Kya as a somewhat Edenic figure, don’t be so quick to judge.

As Taylor Swift sings in “Carolina,” the film’s closing song — which, in its lyrics about “creeks runnin’ through my veins,” bridges pop music with Americana — there’s also an ominous warning: “Muddy these webs we weave.”

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains sexual material and some violence, including a sexual assault. 125 minutes.

Where The Crawdads Sing Review

Where The Crawdads Sing

Translating a much-loved novel to the big screen is always a tricky task. With Delia Owens’ Where The Crawdads Sing , which has sold more than 12 million copies to date, the audience is big and the expectations are high. This cinematic version, produced by Reese Witherspoon ’s Hello Sunshine, unfortunately doesn’t succeed in meeting them.

Daisy Edgar-Jones , a star on the rise after her incredible performance in BBC/Hulu series Normal People and playing a gutsy final girl in horror-thriller Fresh , is plunged into a swampy, period environment here. She is Kya, a solitary young woman left to fend for herself after her mother, then siblings, then abusive father, all desert her. Shunned by the townsfolk around her, it doesn’t take long for fingers to point in her direction when a man is found dead near her home.

You never quite buy the young, thin, beautiful, white Kya as a true outsider.

This murder accusation, and the trial deciding Kya’s fate, is the framing device for the film. Ditching the more chronological approach of the book, Lucy Alibar’s screenplay reveals the crime at the very top of the runtime, flashing backwards and forwards to fill in the gaps. This might not be an uncommon way to approach this kind of story, but it does dispel a certain amount of tension from the start — and the loose, feeble attempt at courtroom drama is nowhere near gripping enough to make it a setting we’re keen to return to.

Edgar-Jones’ natural charm, steely determination and convincing, almost-feral disposition, especially early on, keep you on Kya’s side, and Harris Dickinson impresses once again as charmingly sinister former quarterback Chase Andrews. He and Kya’s toxic, sometimes violent relationship adds some edge to this otherwise quite gentle movie — and though their dynamic is contrasted nicely by the safety and warmth Kya feels with all-American shrimper’s son Tate (Taylor John Smith), the latter pairing leaves a lot to be desired in terms of chemistry.

The trouble with this version of Where The Crawdads Sing is that you never quite buy the young, thin, beautiful, white Kya as a true outsider. The girl from the novel, covered in dirt and consumed by gnawing loneliness, is sanded down and smoothed out, her every thought over-explained by incessant voiceover. That treatment seems to have been applied to every other element of the film, too — so much so, it feels like it would be more at home in the BBC’s 8pm Sunday night slot than here on the big screen. The direction and cinematography are thoroughly conventional, lacking in much flavour or wonder, save for some beautiful sunset shots of the marshes, and the score is often saccharine and overbearing. For fans of the book, there will be some satisfaction in watching these characters come to life and the plot’s twists and turns play out — but for newcomers to this story, it is, unfortunately, underwhelming.

Movies | 17 05 2022

Movies | 22 03 2022

Movies | 22 07 2020

Where The Crawdads Sing Reviews Are In, See What Critics Are Saying About The Adaptation Of The Bestselling Book

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in the book-to-film adaptation.

Delia Owens took the literary world by storm with her 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing , and it was little surprise when the film got picked up to be adapted as a movie . Reese Witherspoon is a producer on the upcoming mystery drama after selecting the book for her Hello Sunshine Book Club, and now audiences are about to see the struggles of Marsh Girl Kya play out on the big screen. Where the Crawdads Sing has screened for critics ahead of its July 22 release, and the reviews are in.

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kya Clark, a girl who is forced to grow up early and learn to survive on her own in the North Carolina marsh after being abandoned by her parents and siblings. Kya finds herself a suspect in a murder when her ex-boyfriend Chace Andrews (Harris Dickinson) turns up dead.

So how did critics feel about director Olivia Newman’s vision of Delia Owens’ best-selling book ? Let’s turn to the reviews, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of Where the Crawdads Sing . Our own Sarah El-Mahmoud rates the film 3 stars out 5, saying the film loses some of the spirit of the beloved book, as Olivia Newman seems to avoid the story’s grittiness in a somewhat glossy adaptation. She argues:

Just because a story is popular and is given a sizable budget to be adapted to the big screen, why should the spirit of the character be made nice and marketable, when the very core of her being is someone who is rough around the edges and cast out by the mainstream?

Hoai-Tran Bui of SlashFilm was similarly underwhelmed with the film, rating it 6 out of 10. This review says the murder mystery is turned into a glossy romance, resulting in a “soapy snooze”:

Despite the sordid stories surrounding its author and despite the sensationalist murder trial which makes up the bulk of its narrative, Where the Crawdads Sing is pretty banal. Its attempts at social commentary comes up short, while its heartstring-tugging is half-assed. The bildungsroman beats are promising before it gives way to the soapy love triangle that feels like a Nicholas Sparks reject. The saving graces are Edgar-Jones and David Straithairn, the latter of whom gives a warm, folksy performance as Kya's lawyer and lone sympathetic ear during the trial that seems like it's all but convicted her for murder based on evidence that is clearly circumstantial.

Lovia Gyarkye of The Hollywood Reporter calls the adaptation a “muddled moral fantasy” whose narrative relies heavily on racial and gender stereotypes. This review says while the Black characters are underdeveloped (a fault of the book as well, the critic argues), Kya is painted as so beautiful and delicate that she comes off as more “manic pixie dream girl than misanthropic protagonist”:

Where the Crawdads Sing is the kind of tedious moral fantasy that fuels America’s misguided idealism. It’s an attempt at a complex tale about rejection, difference and survival. But the film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

David Ehrlich of IndieWire grades the movie a C+, saying Olivia Newman made Delia Owens’ literary sensation into a summer popcorn flick, as it never dives deeper than surface level. The film adaptation isn’t worthy of same celebration received by the book, but it finds just enough ways to endure, in large part thanks to its star, the review says:

The film version of Where the Crawdads Sing is a lot more fun as a hothouse page-turner than it is as a soulful tale of feminine self-sufficiency. That it’s able to split the difference between Nicholas Sparks and Nell with any measure of believability is a testament to Daisy Edgar-Jones’ careful performance as Kya Clark.

Owen Gleiberman of Variety , meanwhile, finds Where the Crawdads Sing “compelling,” but says Daisy Edgar-Jones’ Kya is quite “poised” and “refined” for a character who learned to survive on her own and is known as a “wild child.” Overall, Where the Crawdads Sing is as dark as it is romantic, he says:

CINEMABLEND NEWSLETTER

Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News

Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women’s power and independence in a world crushed under by masculine will. ... The ending is a genuine jaw-dropper, and while I wouldn’t go near reveling it, I’ll just say that this is a movie about fighting back against male intransigence that has the courage of its outsider spirit.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, you’ll be able to check out Where the Crawdads Sing when it hits theaters on Friday, July 22. Until then, be sure to check out our 2022 Movie Release Schedule to see what other films will be gracing a theater near you in the near future.

Heidi Venable is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend, a mom of two and a hard-core '90s kid. She started freelancing for CinemaBlend in 2020 and officially came on board in 2021. Her job entails writing news stories and TV reactions from some of her favorite prime-time shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Bachelor. She graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in Journalism and worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades in multiple roles including Sports Editor, Page Designer and Online Editor. Unprovoked, will quote Friends in any situation. Thrives on New Orleans Saints football, The West Wing and taco trucks.

Now You See Me 3: What We Know So Far

After The Met Gala, Rita Ora Took A Break And Rocked Not One But Two Sheer Looks On Vacation

SNL’s Colin Jost Hilariously Revealed Why He’s Mad About Marvel’s New Release Schedule On Weekend Update

Where the Crawdads Sing ending explained: Did Kya kill Chase?

Daisy Edgar-Jones' movie is now available to watch on Netflix.

preview for Daisy Edgar Jones | Where The Crawdads Sing

Did Kya kill Chase in Where the Crawdads Sing?

Does where the crawdads sing's ending change the book.

Where the Crawdads Sing ending spoilers follow

Where the Crawdads Sing revolves around one important question that never quite gets a clear answer until the very end – did Kya kill Chase?

Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones , this adaptation of Delia Owens' best-selling novel was originally released in 2022 with disappointing results , and it's now being rediscovered by viewers upon its arrival on Netflix UK .

The story follows Kya (Edgar-Jones), known as 'the marsh girl' since she was abandoned by her family as a young girl and was forced to build a life for herself in the North Carolina marshes. The "civilised" people from town mostly ignore her, at least until she finds herself at the epicentre of a murder case.

Beloved local boy Chase Andrews (played by The Iron Claw 's Harris Dickinson) has been found dead in the marshes, and Kya, with whom he shared a short romantic entanglement, is the prime suspect.

Was Kya really involved in Chase's death? If so, was it an accident or a deliberate murder? We delve into the ending.

Where the Crawdads Sing ending explained

Where the Crawdads Sing follows Kya's journey from living with an abusive father as a child to falling in love with a local boy named Tate. However, when Tate leaves town to go to university, she ends up meeting Chase, who drags her into a toxic and abusive relationship.

Once the murder takes place, Kya is brought in front of a jury as the main suspect since the crime was committed in the marshes (a place she knows better than anybody) and given their history together.

There is also the matter of Chase's shell necklace, which his mother brings up in court as an incriminating piece of information. Chase used to wear the necklace every single day after Kya gifted it to him, but the item was not found with his body.

According to his mother, Kya is the only person who would care to retrieve that necklace, but it's obviously not a strong piece of evidence against her.

daisy edgar jones david strathairn in where the crawdads sing

During the trial, her lawyer Tom Milton proves that Kya couldn't have committed the crime since she wasn't in town at the time of the murder. She was staying in a hotel in a different town that day so, in order to kill Chase, she'd have had to take a bus in the middle of the night and travel back at 2am in order to wake up in the hotel.

There are no witnesses placing Kya on that bus and no more hard evidence, so the jury finds her not guilty.

Freed from all charges, she returns home to find Tate waiting for her. They are finally able to be together, build a life in the marshes and live happily ever after. In fact, it's not until Kya dies of old age that we (and Tate) find out the truth about Chase's murder.

Yes, she did! The truth is revealed at the very end of the movie, decades after the main story.

After Kya's death, Tate goes through her things and finds a notebook filled with her poems and drawings. He smiles as he goes over the pages, enjoying his lost partner's words and artistry, until he finds something hidden in one of the corners of the book. His smile freezes.

In a secret compartment, Kya hid Chase's missing shell necklace, which means she did kill him and Chase's mother was right – she did want to keep the necklace afterwards.

There is no doubt this was a deliberate murder, given that Kya went to the trouble of finding herself an alibi (staying out of town) and knew how important it was to keep that necklace hidden.

Her reasons are never explicitly explained but it is clear that Chase was becoming abusive and didn't want to leave Kya alone. Growing up with an abusive father, Kya was probably tired of being prey and became predator instead in order to ensure her own survival.

When Tate discovers the necklace, he is visibly shocked, but he ends up throwing it in the marshes so nobody ever finds out the truth.

The movie adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing is pretty faithful to Delia Owens' original story, including the ending.

"We never considered changing the ending. For me, the ending is the story. That ending is everything to understand who Kya is and the choices that she was faced with," director Olivia Newman told The Wrap in 2022.

"You have to have that ending. That was always incredibly important to me."

In the book, Owens explores Kya's childhood in more detail, as well as her poetry work, which becomes an important narrative device throughout the story. Most of the poems in the story are signed by local published author Amanda Hamilton.

At the end of the book, Tate not only realises Kya murdered Chase but he also finds out that Amanda Hamilton is a name Kya has been using to publish her own work.

The book ends with one of her compositions, called 'The Firefly', which revolves around how female fireflies attract male mates through false signals in order to lure them to their deaths. It symbolises her own strategy to kill Chase.

"We did discuss shooting a slightly more explicit version of the ending," Newman added.

"The book leaves so much to the imagination – you get to understand who Kya is, but never fully. That's part of what's mysterious about her. We wanted to maintain that there's a mystery to it."

Where The Crawdads Sing is available to watch on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.

May 2024 gift ideas and deals

Buy Zendaya's 'I Told Ya' Challengers t-shirt

Amazon Music Unlimited – 30-day free trial

Digital Spy Holidays - trips with TV experts

Audible, 50% off for 4 months

Watch the Fallout TV show for free

Buy Alison Hammond's outfits

Apple TV+ 7-day free trial

Sign up for Disney+

PS5 Slim Consoles

Buy Cat Deeley's This Morning outfits

Crunchyroll 14-day free trial

Shop Sky TV, broadband and mobile

Deputy Movies Editor, Digital Spy Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over seven years, mostly for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas .

Her work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema in the UK.

She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service . During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world, and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. Now based in the UK, Mireia joined Digital Spy in June 2023 as Deputy Movies Editor.

.css-15yqwdi:before{top:0;width:100%;height:0.25rem;content:'';position:absolute;background-image:linear-gradient(to right,#51B3E0,#51B3E0 2.5rem,#E5ADAE 2.5rem,#E5ADAE 5rem,#E5E54F 5rem,#E5E54F 7.5rem,black 7.5rem,black);} Endings Explained

Mea Culpa ending explained on Netflix

will forte, siobhan cullen, robyn cara, bodkin

Netflix's Bodkin ending explained

Who wins the match at the end of Challengers?

adelayo adedayo, martin freeman, the responder, season 2

Responder season 2 ending, explained

Emma Stone as Abigail Masham in The Favourite

The Favourite ending explained

nicholas galitzine and anne hathaway, the idea of you

The Idea of You ending fixes a major fan complaint

timothee chalamet, zendaya, dune part two

Dune 2 ending explained

Netflix's Goodbye Earth ending explained

clara galle, julio pena, through my window looking at you

Through My Window 3 ending explained

Triangle of Sadness ending explained

The Zone of Interest ending is unforgettable

‘Where The Crawdads Sing’ ending explained: Is Kya found guilty?

The 2022 murder mystery stars Normal People's Daisy Edgar-Jones

The 2022 murder mystery Where The Crawdads Sing lands on Netflix this week, but what happens to lead character Kya in the end?

The film was based on the massively successful 2018 novel by Delia Owens, and stars Normal People ’s Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya, a young woman living on her own in rural North Carolina, who is accused of murdering local man Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson).

Adapted for the screen by Lucy Alibar ( Beasts of the Southern Wild ) and directed by Olivia Newman ( First Match ), the film also boasts ‘Carolina’, an original song written and recorded for the film by Taylor Swift .

Speaking about her relationship with the film, Swift said: “ Where The Crawdads Sing is a book I got absolutely lost in when I read it years ago. As soon as I heard there was a film in the works starring the incredible Daisy Edgar Jones and produced by the brilliant Reese Witherspoon , I knew I wanted to be a part of it from the musical side.

“I wrote the song ‘Carolina’ alone and asked my friend Aaron Dessner to produce it. I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerising story.”

In a two-star review of the film , NME wrote: “ Where the Crawdads Sing is often laughable, but Newman doesn’t present the material with the kind of panache that could complete its transformation into a trash classic. Like its heroine, it’s too skittish to embrace its inner wildness – a wannabe naturalist that insists on covering up.”

Is Kya found guilty in Where The Crawdads Sing ?

Recommended.

When Kya’s former partner Chase is found dead in a nearby marsh, Kya is charged with his murder and is immediately assumed to be guilty by the suspicious townspeople.

Kya had previously left Chase for Tate, a previous lover that had re-entered her life. Upon learning that Kya had left him, Chase attempts to rape Kya, but she fights him off, vowing to kill him if he does not leave her in peace.

The prosecutors speculate that Kya lured Chase to a bell tower and pushed him to his death, but the jury find her not guilty due to insufficient evidence.

What happens to Kya?

Kya and Tate spend the rest of their lives together, with Kya successfully publishing her own illustrated nature books.

We see an elderly Kya in a boat on the swamp, reminiscing about her childhood and her missing mother. Tate later finds Kya lying dead in the boat in the docks.

As he begins to box up her possessions, Tate finds Chase’s shell necklace that was missing from his recovered body, alongside Kya’s drawing of Chase, and a passage that says, “to protect the prey, sometimes the predator has to be killed”. Tate throws the shell into the marsh.

Related Topics

Johnny Oleksinski

‘where the crawdads sing’ review: overblown and tedious southern drama.

View Author Archive
Get author RSS feed

Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.

If you walk into “Where The Crawdads Sing” looking for a nice animated movie about a shellfish choir, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

Running time: 125 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual content and some violence including a sexual assault.) In theaters.

No, the sappy film is about a beautiful woman who lives in a marsh. And don’t you forget it! Based on controversial author Delia Owens’ popular novel, when the dialogue isn’t sanitizing abuse and rape, it’s waxing poetic about sea creatures, grass and owls.

Long stretches of floral language is OK in a book. On-screen, however, it’s pretentious. A slog in a bog.

Sure, we always love to see Daisy Edgar-Jones, the talented British actress who hit it big with the brilliant miniseries “Normal People.” But, unlike that layered show, “Crawdads” gives her nothing to chew on except a Southern accent.

We first meet her character Kya as she is arrested for the murder of a man named Chase, who fell to his death from a watchtower. To explain what happened, she tells her lawyer, an Atticus Finch type played by David Strathairn, her overly literary life story.

Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kya, who townsfolk call "the marsh girl," in "Where The Crawdad Sings."

Little Kya (Jojo Regina) lives in a cabin far from a North Carolina town — you gotta use a boat to get anywhere — with her mom, siblings and a cruel father in the 1950s. When they gradually all run from their dangerous situation, including no-good pop, she’s left to fend for herself.

Grown-up and gorgeous, she is shunned by the town like Hester Prynne and derisively called “marsh girl.” North Carolina, we learn, is a bizarro state in which beautiful, well-dressed people are hated. But not by Kya’s freakishly kind childhood friend named Tate (Taylor John Smith), who starts wooing her. It’s a match made in marshland: She’s obsessed with scallops and he wants to be a biologist.

Men boat up to Kya’s house in the middle of the night as if auditioning for an aquatic “Say Anything,” and next in line is Chase (Harris Dickinson), a jerk.

Her choice is obvious, but it takes some 90 minutes of overripe dialogue to get there.

Tate (Taylor John Smith) and Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) are smitten.

Tate and Chase are crudely drawn characters on-screen — an angel and devil — and we never fully embrace either. Because the story is about a woman’s painful struggle, the film is afraid of ever becoming fully romantic. The only thing Kya, a keen artist, is in love with is painting pictures of snails.

Strange, though, how hesitant director Olivia Newman is with depictions of violence. Every deplorable slap and punch is safely presented, and are overcome with unbelievable ease. Early in the movie, one of Kya’s brothers — a little boy — walks out of the house having just been pummeled by their dad. Bruised, bloodied and blasé, his casual demeanor suggests he just left the candy store.

Mabel (Michael Hyatt) runs a local shop and helps Kya.

Also bothersome are the characters Mabel (Michael Hyatt) and Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.), flatly written black shop owners who exist solely to console and protect Kya and have no other defining details or characteristics.

Providing a hint of redemption is Edgar-Jones, a naturally vulnerable actress who can turn the shallowest of material into something deep. We like Kya and are with her every step of the way, even though at over two hours there about 50 steps too many.

After an interminable windup (more sweeping shots of egrets!), the bombshell ending is rewarding.

Yet, I suspect it’s a lot more fun to arrive at on a Kindle.

Share this article:

TV & Film
Say Maaate to a Mate
First Impressions - The Game
Daily Ladness
Citizen Reef

To make sure you never miss out on your favourite NEW stories , we're happy to send you some reminders

Click ' OK ' then ' Allow ' to enable notifications

True story behind number 2 film on Netflix that had writer wanted for questioning in murder

The true story behind netflix's second-highest film had the author delia owens wanted for questioning about an alleged murder.

Michael Slavin

The number two film on Netflix right now is a murder-mystery thriller with a brilliant twist.

Sounds normal enough right?

That’s until you realise the crazy true story behind Netflix's latest hit - in which the writer was wanted for questioning for a murder.

Check out the trailer here:

Plot synopsis

The film is Where The Crawdads Sing , based on a 2018 novel of the same name.

Written by author Delia Owens, the writer has also co-authored a number of books with her husband, Mark Owens, including The Eye of the Elephant, Survivor's Song and Cry of the Kalahari .

Where The Crawdads Sing follows a young woman, Kya Clark - played by Normal People's Daisy Edgar-Jones in the movie - who is seemingly wrongfully accused of the murder of her ex-boyfriend, Chase Andrews.

The film didn't do that well critically upon its release, however, audiences seemed to enjoy it - with it receiving an audience score of 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Mark and Delia Owens. (William Campbell via Getty Images)

What is the story?

It all started with a documentary called Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story released in 1997, which details the Owens’ story and their fights against poachers in Zambia.

In footage from the documentary, however, Mark is reportedly seen encouraging people to shoot poachers, according to ScreenRant.

Separately, the alleged murder of a poacher is also shown in footage of the documentary.

However, there is nothing to prove that this is true.

This led to a murder investigation by the Zambian police - with the main suspect being Mark Owens’ adult son from his first marriage, Christopher Owens.

Whilst the investigation did not bring about any charges against the family or anyone else at the time, this did not appear to be the end of it.

What happened next?

A piece by The Atlantic posted in 2022 saw Jeffrey Goldberg go over to Zambia, where he interviewed Lillian Shawa-Siyuni, Zambia’s director of public prosecutions.

Situni said: “There is no statute of limitations on murder in Zambia. They are all wanted for questioning in this case, including Delia Owens.”

Owens went on to write a novel which became 2022's Where the Crawdad's Sing. (Sony Pictures)

Goldberg went on to say in his piece that the Zambian police officials he'd met with were 'keen to interrogate Mark and Christopher Owens, but also believe that Delia Owens should be interrogated as a possible witness, co-conspirator, and accessory to felony crimes'.

The Owens family have all routinely deny any connection to the alleged death.

A decade ago, Delia told the publication: "We don’t know anything about it. The only thing Mark ever did was throw firecrackers out of his plane, but just to scare poachers, not to hurt anyone."

She also alleged that her stepson was not there on the night of the incident, saying: "We don’t even know where that event took place. It was horrible, a person being shot like that."

And in an interview with the New York Times, Owens also denied any involvement, saying she had nothing to do with the shooting and was never accused of any wrong-doing.

"I was not involved,” she said . “There was never a case, there was nothing.”

As of now, the case still remains unsolved.

Topics: Netflix , Film , Crime , TV and Film

Choose your content:

Ricky Gervais' Netflix co-star emotional admitting he's close to quitting acting after a year with no work

He said he is the 'closest he has ever been to giving up acting'.

Bizarre reason Heath Ledger was constantly licking his lips in The Dark Knight

The late and great actor was something of a genius when it came to mastering the joker.

Netflix viewers blown away by ending of violent British revenge thriller with near perfect Rotten Tomatoes score

Viewers were blown away by the ending.

House of the Dragon season two official trailer is here

House of the dragon season two has dropped a new look official trailer as the show releases next month.

True story behind hit Netflix series Mindhunter as fans demand third season
Unbelievable true story behind Netflix’s demonic documentary The Devil on Trial
Netflix fans stunned after realising true meaning behind email addresses used in Baby Reindeer
Horrific true story behind Netflix's 'most harrowing' new cannibal movie

Action/Adventure
Children's/Family
Documentary/Reality
Amazon Prime Video

More From Decider

'Unfrosted' Has Everyone Wondering "What's The Deal With Jerry Seinfeld?"

Chrissy Teigen Stuns John Legend On 'The Drew Barrymore Show' With Reveal...

Brooke Shields Flashed Her ‘Mother of the Bride’ Co-Star Benjamin...

Andy Cohen Reveals Sarah Jessica Parker's Reaction When He Suggested Rosie...

Anne Hathaway's 'Tonight Show' Interview Hits An Awkward Snag After The...

11 Best New Movies on Netflix: May 2024's Freshest Films to Watch

John Green’s ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ Cameo Is a Treat for His...

Spider-Man Swings onto 'X-Men '97' — But This Isn't Just Any Spider-Man

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ on Hulu, a Period Melodrama That’s Based On The Best-Selling Novel

Where to stream:.

Where the Crawdads Sing

New Shows & Movies To Watch This Weekend: ‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ on Max + More

7 movies like ‘where the crawdads sing’, where was ‘where the crawdads sing’ filmed top filming locations.

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 .

Daisy Edgar-Jones
Stream It Or Skip It

'The View's Sunny Hostin Covers Her Face In Embarrassment As Whoopi Goldberg Asks If She'd Let Sherri Shepherd Date Her 21-Year-Old Son

Does 'Yellowstone' Return Tonight? 'Yellowstone's Season 5, Part 2 Premiere Date Info, Kevin Costner Updates, And More

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ on VOD, in Which Guy Ritchie Directs A Fictional Spin on a Real-Life WWII Era Secret Spy Mission

'Unfrosted' Has Everyone Wondering "What's The Deal With Jerry Seinfeld?"

Chrissy Teigen Stuns John Legend On 'The Drew Barrymore Show' With Reveal About Her Exes: "Wow"

Andy Cohen Reveals Sarah Jessica Parker's Reaction When He Suggested Rosie O'Donnell Take Over As Che Diaz In 'And Just Like That'

Where the Crawdads Sing parents guide: The PG-13 thriller is now on Hulu -- but is it okay for teens?

Where the Crawdads Sing was a best-selling novel by Delia Owens, so it wasn’t that surprising to hear that it was going to be turned into a movie. Now that movie is available to stream on Hulu, you’ll want to know if it’s for the kids.

The thriller follows Kya, a young girl who raised herself in North Carolina’s marshlands after being abandoned when she was young. She’s a resilient young woman, who finds herself drawn to two young men from town.

When one of the men is found dead, Kya is the immediate suspect. Everyone always wants to blame the outcast, right? Kya needs to find a way to prove her innocence, and it’s soon clear that nothing is all that clear as secrets are revealed.

This is a PG-13 movie, but there are some strong scenes of violence and sexual abuse. Let’s dive into why this may not be right for every teenager you know.

Where the Crawdads Sing parents guide: Explaining The PG-13 age rating

While the movie is rated PG-13 in the United States, it’s rated 15 in the UK. This gives us a good idea as to who the movie is more suitable for. The younger teens may find some of the scenes frightening and uncomfortable to watch. The topic is certainly an important one, but there are better ways to discuss it than to sit with this movie.

Nudity and sex: Yes, there is some nudity and sex in this movie. There’s no full-frontal nudity, which is why it gets to keep its PG-13 rating. The sex is shown but not in graphic detail.

Violence: It’s the strong violence that will be uncomfortable for a lot of viewers. At one point, we see a man beating his wife, and there are scenes of sexual assault. While not graphic, it’s extremely clear what is going on. There is a scene where the dead body is shown. This isn’t graphic, either. Think of what you would see on the likes of NCIS and FBI , which are primetime shows.

Language: The use of language is on the milder side considering the topic of Where the Crawdads Sing . The worst words are “b*****d,” “s**t,” and “w***e.”

Alcohol and drugs: We do see a lot of characters consuming alcohol throughout the movie. There are scenes in bars and scenes where individuals are relaxing with a beer. The worst of the alcohol use is when we see a bottle of liquor with a drunken man beating his wife. No drugs are shown in the movie.

Overall verdict: Who is Where the Crawdads Sing appropriate for?

While this is a PG-13 movie, I wouldn’t put this on for the younger teens in the house. There are some disturbing and frightening scenes. Older teens should be okay, although they may find the topics uncomfortable. It’s certainly worth having a discussion with them afterward.

This article was originally published on theparentwatch.com as Where the Crawdads Sing parents guide: The PG-13 thriller is now on Hulu -- but is it okay for teens? .

Where the Crawdads Sing parents guide: The PG-13 thriller is now on Hulu -- but is it okay for teens?

IMAGES

Where the Crawdads Sing Release Date, Cast, Trailer, and More
Movie Review: Where the Crawdads Sing
Where the Crawdads Sing movie review (2022)
Movie reviews: 'Where the Crawdads Sing' and more
Where the Crawdads Sing Movie Review
Um Lugar Bem Longe Daqui

COMMENTS

Where the Crawdads Sing movie review (2022)
For a film about a brave woman who's grown up in the wild, living by her own rules, "Where the Crawdads Sing" is unusually tepid and restrained. And aside from Daisy Edgar-Jones ' multi-layered performance as its central figure, the characters never evolve beyond a basic trait or two. We begin in October 1969 in the marshes of fictional ...
Where the Crawdads Sing
Rated 4.5/5 Stars • Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 08/31/23 Full Review Brandon Richardson For the genre/type of movie, it is, Where the Crawdads Sing is pretty decent. Daisy Edgar-Jones was the ...
'Where the Crawdads Sing' Review: A Wild Heroine, a Soothing Tale
July 13, 2022. Where the Crawdads Sing. Directed by Olivia Newman. Drama, Mystery, Thriller. PG-13. 2h 5m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our ...
Where the Crawdads Sing review
The film, like the book, proceeds on two timelines, the latter being a swampy mystery in 1969: who, if anyone, killed Chase Anderson, the (relatively) rich kid of Barkley Cove, North Carolina ...
'Where the Crawdads Sing' Review: A Compelling Wild-Child Tale
The movie, written by Lucy Alibar ("Beasts of the Southern Wild") and directed by Olivia Newman with a confidence and visual vivacity that carry you along (the lusciously crisp cinematography ...
Where the Crawdads Sing
Full Review | Oct 3, 2022. Scott Tobias The Reveal (Substack) TOP CRITIC. The PG-13-ness of Where the Crawdads Sing buffs every rough edge off this story—the abuse, the abandonment, the betrayal ...
Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
Where the Crawdads Sing: Directed by Olivia Newman. With Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, David Strathairn. A woman who raised herself in the marshes of the Deep South becomes a suspect in the murder of a man with whom she was once involved.
Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
8/10. A gripping romantic drama. Anurag-Shetty 19 September 2022. Where the Crawdads Sing is based on the novel of the same name, by Delia Owens. It tells the story of Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Kya who grows up alone in the woods of the deep south, is the prime suspect in a murder investigation.
Where the Crawdads Sing review
The scene is the beautiful and dangerous marshland of North Carolina in the 50s and 60s, a place "where the crawdads sing"; crawdads being crayfish that apparently sing metaphorically, doing ...
Daisy Edgar-Jones in 'Where the Crawdads Sing': Film Review
Where the Crawdads Sing is the kind of tedious moral fantasy that fuels America's misguided idealism. It's an attempt at a complex tale about rejection, difference and survival. But the film ...
Movie Review: Where the Crawdads Sing
Movie Review: In Where the Crawdads Sing, a film adaptation of Delia Owens's runaway bestseller, a young North Carolina woman who's lived away from society is accused of murder. Daisy Edgar ...
Where The Crawdads Sing Review: Gorgeous Visuals Clash With
The gorgeously-shot movie is incredibly faithful to the book and will no doubt delight those who have eagerly devoured its pages. However, as a movie, Where the Crawdads Sing stumbles a bit in its transition from page to screen, though it is aided by a great lead performance. Picking up in 1969, the sleepy town of Barkley Cove, North Carolina ...
'Where the Crawdads Sing' review: Good book turned bad movie
Review: 'Where the Crawdads Sing' is the latest literary sensation turned ho-hum movie. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Taylor John Smith in "Where the Crawdads Sing.". (Michele K. Short / Sony) By ...
Where the Crawdads Sing Review: Bestseller Becomes Glossy Summer Movie
It's just a shame the story's ultra-predictable ending is presented in a way that denies us the full potential of Edgar-Jones' performance, as Newman opts for hair-raising inference over ...
Where the Crawdads Sing Movie Review
Budweiser. Parents need to know that Where the Crawdads Sing is a romantic mystery/drama based on Delia Owens' bestselling 2018 novel. It's set in the coastal marshes of 1950s-'60s North Carolina, where young Kya is dubbed "Marsh Girl" because she lives in near-complete isolation. As a young adult, Kya (Daisy Edgar….
'Where the Crawdads Sing' review:
Placing Daisy Edgar-Jones under the spotlight, "Where the Crawdads Sing" serves up a virtual symphony of chords - adapting a bestselling book that's part wild-child tale, part romance ...
Where the Crawdads Sing
Movie Review. She was born and raised in a swamp. 'Course, it's the "raised" part that's debatable. Kya Clark's Pa was a man of heavy-drinking, heavy-fisted ways. ... So, at about the age of 8, Kya was called upon to raise herself in that little shack deep in the marsh where the crawdads sing. And being alone was a feeling so vast ...
'Where the Crawdads Sing' mixes romantic melodrama with murder mystery
July 13, 2022 at 10:05 a.m. EDT. Daisy Edgar-Jones, left, in "Where the Crawdads Sing." (Michele K. Short/Sony Pictures) (2.5 stars) "I don't know if there's a dark side to nature ...
Where The Crawdads Sing Review
Where The Crawdads Sing is a strange case of a film made marginally more interesting by the circumstances of its creation. Part period romance and part legal drama, this oddly structured literary ...
Where The Crawdads Sing Review
Published on 22 07 2022. Original Title: Where The Crawdads Sing. Translating a much-loved novel to the big screen is always a tricky task. With Delia Owens' Where The Crawdads Sing, which has ...
Where The Crawdads Sing Reviews Are In, See What Critics Are Saying
Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women's power and independence in a world crushed under ...
Where the Crawdads Sing (film)
Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2022 American mystery drama film based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Delia Owens.It was directed by Olivia Newman from a screenplay by Lucy Alibar and was produced by Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter. Daisy Edgar-Jones leads the cast, featuring Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr., Jojo Regina, Garret Dillahunt, Ahna ...
Where the Crawdads Sing ending explained
The movie adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing is pretty faithful to Delia Owens' original story, including the ending. "We never considered changing the ending. For me, the ending is the story.
'Where The Crawdads Sing' ending explained: Is Kya found guilty?
The 2022 murder mystery Where The Crawdads Sing lands on Netflix this week, but what happens to lead character Kya in the end?. The film was based on the massively successful 2018 novel by Delia ...
Where the Crawdads Sing ending explained: Does Kya kill Chase?
Delia Owens's novel Where the Crawdads Sing became a best-seller almost immediately after it was published in 2018, so much so that the prospect of film adaptation swiftly became not so much a ...
'Where The Crawdads Sing' review: Overblown and tedious drama
Based on controversial author Delia Owens' popular novel, when the dialogue isn't sanitizing abuse and rape, it's waxing poetic about sea creatures, grass and owls. Long stretches of floral ...
True story behind number 2 film on Netflix that had writer ...
Where The Crawdads Sing follows a young woman, Kya Clark - played by Normal People's Daisy Edgar-Jones in the movie - who is seemingly wrongfully accused of the murder of her ex-boyfriend, Chase ...
'Where the Crawdads Sing' Netflix Movie Review: Stream It or Skip It?
The movie's based on Delia Owens' bestselling novel. 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 ...
Is Where the Crawdads Sing based on a true story?
The movie adaptation of Delia Owens's best-selling novel Where the Crawdads Sing garnered plenty of buzz when it hit theatres in 2022. Considering it starred Normal People's Daisy Edgar-Jones, was ...
Where the Crawdads Sing parents guide: The PG-13 thriller is now on
Where the Crawdads Sing parents guide: Explaining The PG-13 age rating While the movie is rated PG-13 in the United States, it's rated 15 in the UK. This gives us a good idea as to who the movie ...

Movie Reviews

Christy Lemire

Now playing

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

Girls State

The Fall Guy

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Simon Abrams

Blood for Dust

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

Writer (based upon the novel by)

Cinematographer

Latest blog posts

Meanwhile in France...Cannes to Be Specific

Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar Wastes Its Lavish Potential

​Nocturnal Suburban Teen Angst Fantasia: Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow

A Preview of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Review: A Wild Heroine, a Soothing Tale

Explore More in TV and Movies

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Review: The Bestselling Novel Turned Into a Compelling Wild-Child Tale

Owen Gleiberman

Popular on Variety

Reviewed at Museum of Modern Art, July 11, 2022. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 125 MIN.

More From Our Brands

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Movies / TV

Where the Crawdads Sing Reviews

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

Did You Know?

Photo & Video

Related Items

Recently Viewed

Where the Crawdads Sing review – Daisy Edgar-Jones wasted in terrible southern Gothic schmaltz

Most viewed

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

Lovia Gyarkye

Related Stories

Full credits

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Where the Crawdads Sing Eats Itself into Nothingness

More Movie Reviews

Most Viewed Stories

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

Sign In To Continue Reading

Screen Rant

10 Movie Franchises Where The First Film Is The Best One

Our Rating:

Review: ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is the latest literary sensation turned ho-hum movie

More to Read

Review: In ‘Wildcat,’ director Ethan Hawke — and daughter Maya — bring a literary life to screen

Colm Tóibín’s latest tale is bound together by the tension between secrecy and revelation

Hollywood’s bravest and most foolhardy memoir wasn’t written by a movie star

More From the Los Angeles Times

Miranda July is widening and expanding women’s lives with her new novel: ‘Fiction is my superpower’

What’s the deal with Jerry Seinfeld? His Duke University address sparks student walkout

Roger Corman, independent cinema pioneer and king of B movies, dead at 98

Shari Redstone was poised to make Paramount a Hollywood comeback story. What happened?

‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Review: The Literary Sensation Becomes a Glossy Summer Popcorn Movie

Most Popular

Or browse by category:

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Common Sense Selections for Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

Nocturnal Suburban Teen Angst Fantasia: Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow