109 min | R | November 3, 2023 | Lionsgate
Daisy Ridley plays a woman raised in the wilderness by a father who kidnapped her mother. When he escapes a prison transport, the survival skills he drilled into her become the only thing that can stop him. The bones of a great thriller sit here. The movie never builds the body.
Helena Pelletier lives a quiet life in the Michigan woods with a husband and a daughter she shields from her past. She is the child of Jacob Holbrook, the man the press calls the Marsh King. He abducted a teenage girl and raised Helena in the wilderness, training her to track and kill while she believed he was a god of the marsh. When Jacob escapes a prison transport, the daughter he made becomes the only person equipped to hunt him. The film wants to be about inheritance and the fear that a father’s cruelty lives inside his child. It states that theme more often than it dramatizes it.
Daisy Ridley plays Helena with a clenched, watchful stillness. She holds the character’s two selves in constant tension, the suburban mother and the feral child who knew nothing else. Ben Mendelsohn plays Jacob as a soft-spoken predator who never raises his voice because he never needs to. He is most frightening in the flashbacks, where he teaches a small girl to love him. Brooklynn Prince plays that young Helena and matches Mendelsohn’s calm, which makes the early wilderness scenes the strongest passages in the film. Garrett Hedlund plays the husband Stephen and Caren Pistorius plays the captive mother Beth, but the script strands both in thin, reactive roles.
Neil Burger directs the wilderness flashbacks with patience and the present-day thriller with none. The cinematography renders the marsh in cold greens and standing water that make the captivity feel like a sealed ecosystem. That texture vanishes once the story moves to town, where the camera settles into flat, functional coverage. Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith adapt the source novel and keep the plot machinery but lose the interior voice that gives the material its grip. The film tells us what Helena feels through narration instead of trusting Ridley’s face to carry it. The score pushes hard at the exact moments the staging has already gone slack.
The pieces of a sharp psychological thriller are all here. A magnetic villain, a lead built for the role, and a premise about the violence a parent passes down. Burger assembles them without ever finding the tension that should connect them. The pacing sags in the middle stretch, and the climax resolves a lifetime of damage with a burst of standard genre action. Helena’s struggle deserves an ending that reckons with who her father made her. The film gives her a chase instead.