"A swamp knows all about death, and doesn't necessarily define it as a tragedy, certainly not a sin." So Delia Owens advises in the prologue of her bestselling novel Where the Crawdads Sing, first published in 2018. In this, the inevitable screen reincarnation, the line falls to Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People) as willowy heroine Kya Clark, who – as any strong-willed woman must – narrates her own tale.
The swamp around the fictional North Carolina backwater of Barkley Cove would have claimed the body of Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson, The Souvenir Part II), local hot shot and noted cad, but for a couple of kids who happened to bike past and pick out the blue of his jacket amongst the brackish muck one autumn day in 1969.
Despite a dearth of evidence, the townsfolk are quick to accuse "the Marsh Girl", as Kya is sneeringly called, of murder most foul – and to uncover her covert dalliance with the dead man.
Kya has long been regarded with a mixture of fear and derision in Barkley Cove; abandoned by her family as a child, she has for some 15 years eked out a solitary existence on the fringes, based out of the humble cabin that became hers in the absence of parents and siblings – off-grid even by the standards of the Deep South in the 50s and 60s.
Though she fled her first and only day of schooling, Kya found herself drawn from a young age to the study of the surrounding flora and fauna. By the time of her arrest for Chase's murder, her dedication to analysing this ecosystem has led her – thanks to a splash of fairytale logic, one of Owens's many – to authoring a handsomely illustrated reference volume.
In director Olivia Newman's adaptation, Kya's combination of mettle and naiveté is complemented by impossibly glossy hair and an unlikely array of breezy floral garb. If Edgar-Jones looks more like she's stepped out of a Herbal Essences commercial than any stinking swamp, that's because this is a fantasy, and Kya is the Disney Princess version of a poor, orphaned nature child. No mud must sully her fingernails or face.
(Every Disney Princess must have a prince, of course: Kya's is not Chase but the poetry-reading hunk Tate, played by Sharp Objects' Taylor John Smith – one of the few inhabitants of the Cove to show her any genuine kindness, first in the form of rare feathers for her collection, then through reading lessons.)
And whose fantasy is it? It has been noted that, in Kya, Delia Owens seems to have crafted something of a romanticised self-portrait. Born and raised in the South around the same time as her literary creation, her own naturalist bent would see her strike out for remote Africa in 1974 with her then-husband, Mark Owens.
Over the course of two-plus decades there, the pair conducted an aggressive conservation campaign, pitting themselves against a burgeoning league of ivory poachers, and penned several memoirs about their adventures on what they – tellingly – called the "dark continent".
They would also, like Kya, become embroiled in a murder case.
Delia and Mark Owens, now both living back on US soil, are in fact still wanted in Zambia for questioning in relation to the murder of an alleged poacher in 1995 – an inconvenient fact that the release of this film adaptation has caused to bubble back to the surface of the e-swamp. (Be glad that journalism tends to decompose more slowly than a human corpse.)
Shockingly, the man's death was filmed and televised in the US as part of a documentary program about the Owens's conservation work. The perp, according to the cameraman, was Mark's son Christopher. Both Mark and Delia, however, have stuck to the strategy favoured by accountability-averse personalities from Donald Trump to Shaggy: deny, deny, deny.
(It helps that the victim's body has never been found. "The bush is the perfect place to commit murder," Zambia's former national police commissioner has remarked of the case, in an unsettling echo of Where the Crawdads Sing's prologue. "The animals eat the evidence.")
I dwell on the details of this case in part because it casts an ominous shadow over both novel and film – in which it's clear that, regardless of whodunnit, Chase's slimy behaviour should be understood as pretty much justifying his being murdered – but also because, frankly, the mashup of Basic Instinct and Tiger King that Delia Owens seems to have lived out is arguably far more interesting than her fictional story.
And the film feels bland even in comparison to the book's rote romanticism. Newman's take is about as Southern Gothic as Reese Witherspoon – one of the film's producers, who was instrumental in popularising the book (through her book club, Hello Sunshine), and who also sells plastic wine glasses that say "Cheers Y'all" online through her label, Draper James, for $US18.
Those who are more interested in the promise of steamy swamp romance than the murder mystery will also be disappointed: the film is as salacious as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (Try not to roll your eyes at the swirling rush of CGI leaves and schmaltzy strings that precipitate Kya's first kiss.)
If only there were a little more dirt on Kya here, and less on Delia Owens.
Where the Crawdads Sing is in cinemas from July 21.
