Daisy Ridley of “Star Wars” fame plays Helena, a woman living a nice, suburban life, married to husband Stephen (Garrett Hedlund).
The Marsh King’s Daughter
Jacob seems like a great father to Helena during her childhood, teaching her primitive survival skills, that is, fire, water, shelter, tracking, trapping, hunting, shooting, fishing, and so on. He also insidiously turns her against her mother, insinuating Beth is a pathological liar.Furthermore, he has a need to map his young daughter’s body with tattoos, using the traditional tribal, painful, tapping method, following whatever he deems a significant moment in her survivalist learning curve.
The forgoing was all the past. Then, the film then leaps 20 years into the present day. Helena’s got her own daughter now, Marigold (Joey Carson).
Any Good?
The best thing about “The Marsh King’s Daughter” is the title—straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, and adapted from author Karen Dionne’s bestseller.
However, while it presents as a crime-drama with a promising premise, a decent start, and a fairly rousing ending, the middle bogs down (pun intended) glub-glub-glub in a marsh of boredom, such that the spirited ending feels like too-little-too-late because you’ve already checked your watch at least three times in the past hour.
Right at the outset, when the Marsh King dispenses such wisdoms as “You must always protect your family,” it’s fairly easy to get an inkling as to where the story might be headed.
Much of the narrative unfolds fairly quickly, which leaves a dearth of character development, especially for the film’s pivotal figure. He’s not a bad-looking fellow; why the need to drag a wife off, caveman-style, to the wilderness? Why did he opt for homesteading in the marshland? Was he a “Soldier of Fortune”-reading prepper? How’d he learn all those primitive skills, and where‘d he come by his rather extensive knowledge of the Ojibwe language, and why did he bend and distort the philosophies to his own ends? How’d he survive a severe car accident after a prison break? How’d he break out?
Daisy
Daisy Ridley basically saves the film all by herself with a controlled and haunting performance as Helena. Ben Mendelsohn, normally a very fine actor, is questionable casting here. He’s got a face that is more at home emanating empathy, quiet humor, and the occasional twinkling eye, as well as deep sadness. It’s not a chilling, horror-movie visage, and since most thrillers are now borrowing heavily from the horror genre, with jump scares, non-linear sound, infrasound, red-lighting, and so on, the lead needed to be an actor who can pull off chill and menace, like a Mads Mikklesen, a Ralph Fiennes, or an Anthony Hopkins.And there’s the issue that a guy who stole his wife and tattoo-tortures his daughter, realistically speaking, is also the type of societal menace that is most likely going to be leaving a prepubescent daughter with a whole heck of a lot more trauma than what’s depicted here. It doesn’t ring true.
A film should really gift the audience something. So what’s the takeaway here? Having studied wilderness survival in my 20s, I found myself ruminating on the fact that living off the land is a 24-7, full-time grind, and that I appreciate not having to do it. I personally didn’t really need a lukewarm, mildly entertaining movie to arrive at that conclusion. But you might have the opposite reaction, given the apocalyptic times we live in, and feel a desire to head out to the marshes and set up a trap line. Only one way to find out!
