“Where the Crawdads Sing” (M) ***

I’VE not read Delia Owens’ Carolina salt-marsh novel about pre-school girl-child Kya, abandoned in the care of a brutal father when her mother and siblings flee the family’s backwoods house.

The screenplay by Owens and co-writer Lucy Alibar for director Olivia Newman’s 125 minutes of filming may well accurately reflect the book. By the end, I was working hard to restrain a mixture of righteous indignation and regret that such a dire but ultimately flabby narrative rather blighted the film’s lush exterior locations (actually in adjacent Louisiana, not either of the Carolinas).

Its structure flicks to and fro from a courtroom where a gung-ho prosecutor is trying to persuade a jury that young adult Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) with a talent for drawing wildlife pictures had indeed murdered no-good sometime boyfriend Chase (Harris Dickinson) so deserves to be executed. 

By repeating that presumption several times, the film rather loses its punch while leaving the way clear for Kya’s defending attorney Tom (David Strathairn) to deliver a winning summation of the evidence (apology for the spoiler but it had already made a strong claim).

Quite soon, Kya is living alone in the family’s backwoods house, learning to survive. Tate (Taylor John-Smith), her best friend in early adolescence, gets shuffled off to college to make way for Chase to dally carnally while engaged to another girl (I told you he was a no-good!)

At no time do we see Kya in the company of what every girl needs in her life – an older female who can tell her what’s going on in her body when puberty comes along. Two men have enjoyed her body. The story leaves it to the viewer’s imagination to figure out how Kya became so literate, writing page notes for every drawing. It does not venture into any female companionship from which I guess every girl-child learns reproductive biology 101. That was just one of the film’s several failures to persuade me of its wasted dramatic strength and merit. Which I regret, because I had hoped it would deliver both those qualities.

At all cinemas