126 min | PG-13 | July 15, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
A girl raised alone in the North Carolina marsh becomes a murder suspect when a local man turns up dead. The trial flashes back across her whole isolated life. The swamp is more convincing than anything that happens in it.
Kya Clark grows up abandoned in the marshes outside a small North Carolina town. The locals call her the Marsh Girl and treat her as something less than human. When Chase Andrews dies beneath a fire tower, the town decides she did it, and the film unfolds as a courtroom drama braided with the story of how she got there. Olivia Newman wants this to be two things at once. It wants to be a murder mystery and a coming-of-age romance, and it commits fully to neither.
Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kya as watchful and guarded, which fits a character who trusts no one. The problem is that the guard never drops in a way that reveals what is underneath. Taylor John Smith plays Tate Walker as the gentle boy who teaches her to read, and he is so uniformly decent that he reads as a plot function rather than a person. Harris Dickinson gives Chase Andrews a flicker of menace that the script keeps sanding down. David Strathairn plays defense attorney Tom Milton with the only lived-in performance in the film, and every scene improves the moment he speaks.
Newman directs from a screenplay by Lucy Alibar, adapting Delia Owens’s novel. The cinematography renders the marsh in soft golden light, and that prettiness is the central miscalculation. A story about poverty, abuse, and a child surviving alone in the wild should look harsh, but every frame is lit like a perfume ad. The editing cross-cuts between the trial and the past so relentlessly that neither timeline builds tension. The film tells you constantly how Kya feels without ever letting an image do the work.
This is a glossy adaptation that mistakes good production design for emotional weight. The mystery resolves with a twist the film treats as profound and the staging treats as an afterthought. Edgar-Jones and Strathairn are doing real work inside a movie that keeps smoothing every edge that might have cut. What remains is handsome, sincere, and inert.