Movie Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

This movie jumps back and forth without much momentum between a young woman’s murder trial and the recollections of her rough-and-tumble childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s surviving within a squalid, swampy setting. The beginning of the movie shows a couple of boys who stumble upon a dead body lying in the muck, a mysterious opening that leaves the audience in suspense. Then we get a series of flashbacks that reveal the abuse she and her family endured at the hands of her alcoholic father and the abandonment that followed when her mother left, each sibling did the same one by one. These vivid, early sections are the most emotionally powerful to see as eight-year-old Kya is left to fend for herself. Over the years she learned how to live with her abusive father and meets two very different young men who shaped her in her early adulthood. One who shows her how to read and write and one who is a bully and bad for her from the start 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. The writer of this movie embodies Kya’s raw impulses while also subtly registering her apprehension and mistrust. Unexpectedly one of the men that came into her life is found dead and Kya because the prime suspect. 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, the crime at the very top of the runtime, flashing backward and forwards to fill in the gaps. Overall this movie will keep you on edge, you won’t be able to stop watching until you know the truth.