Dish the dirt
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING
Cert 15 ★★★ In cinemas now
DO CRAWDADS sing? I’ve no idea. I needed a post-screening Google session to even find out what the heck a crawdad was. But crayfish (in Appalachian slang, apparently) don’t feature in this handsomely mounted adaptation of Delia Owens’s bestselling 1960s-set whodunnit.
Owens’s gritty, impoverished heroine has been cleaned up for her romantic drama duties and recast as a sort of Disney princess of the swamplands. An opening shot follows a CGI heron as it sweeps the sandy beaches, salt marshes, and plush woodlands of North Carolina.
This is the entire world for Kya (Daisy Edgar-jones) or, to the town folk, “the Marsh Girl”, a young outsider who grew up alone in a swampy shack after the disappearance of her father.
Still, she doesn’t look bad on it. With her glossy hair, gleaming teeth, and collection of floaty, floral dresses, she looks more shampoo ad model than steely survivor.
But there’s trouble in paradise when the body of a local lothario is discovered under a rusty fire tower. As the town’s oddball, Kya becomes the prime suspect, and, when the cops find out she was secretly dating the cad, she’s charged with murder.
As the trial nears, flashbacks tell of a violent father and a plucky six-year-old who survived alone by listening to the natural world.
A teenage romance with too-good-to-be-true dreamboat Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) ends when he heads to university, leaving her at the mercy of clearly-a-wrong-un hunk Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson).
The story grips but Owens’s gritty themes are lost in a swamp of gorgeous cinematography, floaty outfits and soapy plotting.
Owens’s gritty heroine is recast as a Disney princess of the marshes