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A murder mystery hidden in beautiful vignettes… 3.75 star review for ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’
By definition, 2022 film Where the Crawdads Sing is a murder mystery. But it watches much less like a Sherlock Holmes style let-the-audience-try-to-sleuth-it-out puzzle film and more like a drama of woman’s life told in vignettes.
The film opens with a few beautiful establishing shots of the film’s mysterious setting, the marsh of North Carolina, which almost acts as a character in itself. We don’t actually meet our protagonist, Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) until a good few minutes into the film. This establishes her as the outsider, the stranger, the enigma that the vast majority of the characters see her as. When we do meet her, she is hiding from the police who have identified her as a suspect in the case of the murder of local man, Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson). The dark undertone of the film is established early on, after the few establishing shots of the scenery, the shocking sight of a dead body in the swamp appears onscreen, and the mystery that drives the story is revealed. But, while the dark undertones are present throughout the film, they are hidden much of the time by the bright and beautiful aesthetic, which, overall, characterizes the film more so.
There is an immediate parallel drawn between Kya and nature, a connection literal and symbolic…
