The film adaptation of the wild girl (Where The Crawdads Sing)the successful book Delia Owens which has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. The film, directed by Olivia Newman, was produced through Hello Sunshine, the company for Reese witherspoonand features an original song composed by the multi-award winning Taylor Swiftwho has just announced his next album Midnights. Beyond the credits, this audiovisual piece makes it clear that Daisy Edgar-Jones can grow beyond the average stories.
During the 1960s, in the swamps of North Carolina, the plot begins with the strange death of a young man who had been a football player in high school. All suspicions point to the wild girl, a hermit woman who lives in the area and who is immediately accused of the crime. Now locked up and away from nature, the first perception we have of Kya – as her family called her – is that of a person dragged into an environment that does not belong to her, the town of Barkley Cove.
Kya agrees to be defended by one of the few people who believes she is innocent, a retired attorney named Tom Milton (David Strathairn). However, she will first have to delve into her past to make her alibi solid. She begins with her childhood and her first abandonment that left a hole in her heart for the rest of her life: her mother leaving one morning after being beaten by her husband. Later, she is also left behind by her brothers and finally her violent father.
A girl left to her own devices learns to live and earn money on her own, and she will only have the guidance of an African-American couple, Mabel (Michael Hyatt) and Jumpin (Sterling Macer Jr.), who have a business on the only dock near their home. In this loneliness, he knows Tate Walker from a very young age (Taylor John Smith), and he too will become a familiar face well into his teens and early teens. Both give each other feathers and share information about them, a love language only for two bird lovers.
The problem of the wild girl falls on introducing us to a protagonist with a lesser degree of introversion and illiteracy who tries to make us believe that only those characteristics are the result of a complete abandonment and isolation that occurred since childhood. Kya never went to school and dressed thanks to donated clothes that Mabel gave her, however, the script does not delve into how these events affect her development in the future, but rather that she would seem to be a girl from the town more. This is how the impact behind the nickname “wild girl” collapses.
Although what is not achieved with the appearance and delimited behaviors in the film, Daisy Edgar-Jones He shows it in his performance: from the moments when he falls in love with Tate to when he tries to have his first sexual relationship with him. There is much that she does not know and knows, but when situations occur that are out of her hands, her first instinct is to flee like a wild animal. In the prison scenes, the actress also denotes the cruelty of this separation between her and the swampy area that she considers her safest place.
A trial narrated between the present and the flashbacks
The debut literary story of Delia Owens focuses primarily on the trial she faces for the murder of Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson), interspersed with moments from the past to explain why Kya was involved with the young man in life. After Tate left for college and ended her relationship with her, the wild girl will allow herself to love again even if the next suitor is not the right one and causes her life to take a much worse course… because basically this is the tragic life of this woman who, despite having experienced human evil firsthand and being victim of systemic violence, she continues to be captured under a romantic, idealizing and aesthetic lens in every sense.
For its part, the british star Daisy Edgar-Jones he never ceases to be sublime in every project he lands on. He already demonstrated it in the romantic series of the BBC and Hulu, normal people; in the horror film Fresh, which co-starred with Sebastian Stan; and recently in by command of heaven, Brenda Lafferty’s true crime miniseries at the hands of a Mormon cult. His thing is the drama, but definitely the wild girl it failed to take her too far in terms of the character.
The movie is available to see in theaters in Latin America from September 1.
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‘Wild Girl’: Daisy Edgar-Jones Is Ready To Jump Into Something Bigger