Where Clodad Sings Movie Review: Effective as a story about loneliness and love

It often features striking writing, but it also has a dark past for the author of the book the film is based on. Clodad Thing Effective (although unlikely) as a story about loneliness and love. Not in its grander purpose of shedding light on social prejudices and human bestiality.

All in all, the dark side of the swamp, where the faint and vulnerable Ca (Daisy Edgar Jones) lives alone and has long been, is barely visible. The sun usually mottles gently over foliage, rippling water, flying snow geese and fallen feathers, then sets violently to evoke the creatures of the night.

That’s not to say Kya’s story doesn’t strike a chord in your heart. Abandoned by her family in turn, including her mother, who fled her abusive father, Kya must learn to fend for herself alone in the swamp living in her family’s unprotected home. No, it’s a dirty girl with no shoes on. Her neighboring town knows her fate, but she is too self-righteous to help, and it is too early to later label her as “weak.”

Originally played by Jojo Regina, Kya quickly transforms into a shy but almost ridiculously normal teenager played by Edgar Jones.

Money is scarce, but mussels abound in the wetlands. I have to ask for food, but she seems fine with it. She’s a loner — “a resoundingly vast loneliness,” one of your haunting lines — but there’s an art that fills her time, and it’s her talent that she supernaturally develops and maintains.

Love comes to her symbiotically in the form of a rare childhood friend who has grown into a handsome, intelligent, thoughtful, and kind young man, Tate (Taylor John Smith). He teaches her to read and write, and she finds that she “has much in her words.” Even though it’s set in the 1960s, it’s a warm, tender, gentle romance from a bygone era.

This idyll has periodic interruptions in the form of social services and developers, but nothing that impedes Kya’s journey for long.

But we meet her in an encounter with one real danger that could end her way of life. It is the mysterious death of Chase (Harris Dickinson), the “best quarterback” in town, and she is being charged as the accused.

If Tate and Kya are a natural and easy fit, only her loneliness when he’s gone explains why she’s so easily susceptible to cad’s shallow chases. Edgar Jones manages to convey that frantic alertness well, even when Chase approaches.

At the same time, it is this strong, persistent and caring light in which the film casts Kya that ultimately does the most injustice to the girl who conquered the jungle. I love it, but Kya is endowed with almost too many Good Samaritans at the decisive moment.

“The swamp doesn’t necessarily see death as a tragedy, it doesn’t see it as a sin.” Kya emphasizes this at least twice in Crawdads Sing. But this film, directed by Olivia Newman, desperately seeks to erase any possible contamination that touches her.

But one death that still haunts the film all the time is whether Delia Owens, the book’s writer (on whom the film is based), had a say in a legitimate tragedy from her own life. . Owens is accused of complicity in the televised execution of poachers while on the run as a guardian in Zambia.

“Nature has no dark side,” Kya likes to say. That is, until you mix humans.