Lifeless, boring, and with criminal direction, Where the Crawdads Sing is a huge missed opportunity. Good performances from Daisy Edgar-Jones and David Strathairn aren’t enough to get this off the ground, unfortunately.

With a landscape with the potential to be as hauntingly beautiful as the marsh, you wouldn’t know it with how this film is shot. With an inordinate amount of quick cuts to (I assume) make up for its snail-like pace, the marsh is simply a place where Kya exists, hugely missing on the opportunity to be a character all its own. Even with story flaws, the cinematography for this movie should have been a slam dunk, but like most everything else here, it comes up lacking and lifeless. Unfortunately for the film, the only person who seemed to understand what the tone and approach of this film should have been was Taylor Swift, but the song so heavily advertised in trailers makes no appearance until the closing credits. 

As big a disappointment as you will find in 2022.