Kya is a resourceful girl who has to make her own way in the North Carolina swamps. A strong team of women is now bringing the best-selling novel “The Song of the Crayfish” to the cinema.
Millions of readers know the survival story of the mysterious, abandoned girl nicknamed Kya in the North Carolina swamps. The residents of the small coastal town of Barkley Cove deride her as a neglected “march girl” with whom they want nothing to do. As a young woman, she was tried for murder under her full name, Catherine Danielle Clark.
In the bestselling novel “The Song of the River Crayfish”, which was also published in Germany in 2019 and has sold millions of copies worldwide, the American author and zoologist Delia Owens describes the captivating story of the young, untamed heroine on over 400 pages. Now this mixture of social drama, survival epic, romance, crime thriller, courtroom thriller and nature film is coming to the big screen with a length of 126 minutes.
fight to survive
Not an easy undertaking, the bar is set high. As the heroine of a novel, Kya has a large fan base, her eventful story oscillates back and forth between many time levels. It begins in her childhood in the early 1950s, when her mother and older siblings flee her abusive, drinking father (Garret Dillahunt). In her small hut, without electricity or water, Kya is finally abandoned by her father.
The girl manages to get by on her own, without school or friends, and with only a few contacts with the outside world. Nature around her becomes a surrogate mother. She learns from animals and plants, she catches fish and collects shells. She usually stays away from people, although she longs for closeness.
With the blond, nature-loving Tate (Taylor John Smith) and the daring Chase (Harris Dickinson), two young men enter her life who court the unusual girl. When one of them is found dead at the foot of an old fire lookout tower in the swamp, suspicion falls on the swamp girl. Was it murder or maybe just an accident? The young woman is brought before the court. Her lawyer, played by David Strathairn (“Nomadland”), is one of the few who are well-disposed towards her.
Concentrated female power
The creative team behind “The Song of the Crayfish” – mostly women – managed to walk the tightrope to tell the atmospheric, exciting book in gripping and at the same time poetic images. Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon told Vanity Fair magazine that she immediately fell in love with the girl who was struggling to survive on her own.
Witherspoon is instrumental in producing the film. The book is a “love letter” to the southern United States, where she grew up. If she were younger, she would have loved to play Kya herself, the 46-year-old actress and producer said.
The British newcomer Daisy Edgar-Jones (24) found the leading role. The dark-haired actress, known from the TV mini-series “Normal People” about teenage love, seems too delicate for the role of the wild nature girl at first glance. But the native Londoner quickly transforms into Kya with all her facets – as a lonely, shy but at the same time tough and resourceful young woman.
The screenplay was written by Lucy Alibar, who earned an Oscar nomination for the script for the fable-drama ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ (2012), set in the swamplands of southern New Orleans. Book author Delia Owens (73) knows all about lonely nature. The zoologist researched the African wilderness for more than twenty years and wrote non-fiction books about the wildlife there – “The Song of the Crayfish” is her first novel.
With Olivia Newman, a (still) little-known director came on board, who had previously only made an independent feature film (“First Match”). Newman and her team of women struggled with summer heat, torrential rain, flooding and mosquito infestations while filming in New Orleans marshes. “It was extremely taxing, but there was also something magical about it because that was Kya’s world, too,” Newman told Vanity Fair.
“The Song of the Crayfish” is an ode to nature in which the odd girl finds a home against all odds. What the novel and film lack in realism they make up for in poetic imagery. The melodrama brings a bit of kitsch and clichés with it, but at least Kya doesn’t come up trumps as a superheroine of the swamps. If you love the book, you should also like the film adaptation, which is true to the original.
The Song of the Crayfish, USA 2022, 126 min., FSK from 12 years, by Olivia Newman, with Daisy Edgar-Jones, David Strathairn, Taylor John Smith, Garret Dillahunt