My Review of "Where the Crawdads Sing"

Where the Crawdads Sing is a drama that came out back in 2022. It is one of the best virally advertised movies I've ever seen. They didn't do anything big in terms of advertisement. All of the streaming platforms seem to push this movie as recommended. I don't even watch these types of movies that often. As an idiot, I gave in and decided to watch it. In a way, I'm glad I'm an idiot.

The movie starts off with a beautiful montage of the marsh and the swamps of North Carolina. We then see two little kids playing in this marsh and this is when they discover a dead body. While investigating this dead body, the police don't find any evidence to misplay but they become suspicious of this.

This is when the town starts to buzz with rumors and it's said that maybe the marsh girl did it. When the police go to the marsh girls house they have to pursue her. Eventually, she gets caught and she becomes the prime suspect for the murder of the man that they've found.

With no support in the jailhouse, the marsh girl basically gets a lifeline with a sympathetic lawyer. He wants to help her out because everyone is already assuming her guilt. This is when the marsh girl who is also known as Kya starts telling her story.

It's a tale of woe and tragedy. She's born into a broken family that basically left her at a young age. As the story progresses we see how the township really treated her and what she really had to go through. Some of this is quite heavy handed in terms of overly dramatizing things. They have to, in order to get the point across.

At times, I felt it was weirdly dramatized. At certain points I saw the movie about to push the limits of the pain and suffering she went through but it never quite got there. They could have made the father way worse because he treated Kya's other siblings way worse than he did with Kya. I wished that they'd explain that a little bit more. Maybe it would have made me understand why she stayed for so long whereas the rest of her family didn't.

Still, I felt a lot of sympathy for Kya and her tragic life. I think the whole cast did the best with the material that they got. Each of them have situations where they're progressing into a certain character but just stop short of being that character. There's abrupt actions that felt awkward but deliberate. I don't know what they were thinking with these decisions. Maybe it's a way to help the movie progress without being a long epic.

This movie is pretty much separated into two parts. One part is the origin background of Kya and the second part is the trial that she's working through. I didn't think that they meshed together as well as they should have but separately they're quite intriguing. I thought the courtside drama could have been fleshed out a bit more. They focused more on Kya's life than they did the court drama and in a way it feels a little disjointed because of this.

I kind of wished that they picked a lane so that we could really play around with one direction. This could have been a great court mystery but it could have also been a great story about Kya. Instead they kind of made it a little convoluted. That's not to say you won't understand it. It is a very comprehensible movie. It's just that the flow isn't that great.

Overall, I had a good time with this movie but I think that they could have done a little more editing to make it flow a little better and a little more focused. Regardless, it is a good time. I have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10.