Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2022 American mystery drama film directed by Olivia Newman from a screenplay by Lucy Alibar, based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Delia Owens.

The film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr., Jojo Regina, Garret Dillahunt, Ahna O'Reilly, and David Strathairn.

The story follows an abandoned yet defiant girl, Kya (Edgar-Jones), who raises herself to adulthood in a North Carolina marshland, becoming a naturalist in the process.

She survives by selling mussels at Barkley Cove's general store, owned by Mabel and "Jumpin" Madison, who become Kya's good friends and pseudo-guardians.

Over the years, Kya's slightly older friend Tate Walker lends her books and teaches her to read and write, while Mabel taught her to count.

Despite knowing Kya had been meeting with a book publisher in Greenville at the time, the police and the prosecutor speculate she could have disguised herself and made an overnight round-trip bus ride to Barkley Cove, lured Chase to the fire tower during the brief layover, and killed him.

[8] In April, Garret Dillahunt, Michael Hyatt, Ahna O'Reilly, Sterling Macer Jr., and Jojo Regina were also added,[9] and in June 2021, Eric Ladin was cast.

Swift stated that she "got absolutely lost in [the book] when [she] read it years ago" and "wanted to create something haunting and ethereal" for the film when she heard it was being produced.

[29] In the United States and Canada, Where the Crawdads Sing was released alongside Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, and was initially projected to gross around $10 million from 3,626 theaters in its opening weekend.

[30] Forbes stated the film is "a big win for Sony and for the notion of non-franchise, adult-skewing, female-targeted studio programmers having a future in theatrical release.

"[31] Where the Crawdads Sing made $10.4 million in its second weekend, finishing fourth,[32] with Deadline Hollywood noting the 40% drop as a "great hold" for a "female skewing movie during the pandemic.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Daisy Edgar-Jones gives it her all, but Where the Crawdads Sing is ultimately unable to distill its source material into a tonally coherent drama.

[38][39][40][41] Consequence critic Liz Shannon Miller rated the film A−, describing it as a heartfelt, "lush, lyrical and engrossing Southern Gothic drama".

"[42] Leonard Maltin praised Newman's direction, the cinematography, production design, and music, and said Edgar-Jones "effortlessly commands the big screen" by "inhabiting the character of Kya Clark".

[43] Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called Where the Crawdads Sing "one of the most gorgeously photographed films of the year" and praised the performances of Edgar-Jones and Strathairn.

[45] CNN journalist Brian Lowry praised Edgar-Jones's "old-fashioned movie-star appeal" and summarized the film as "a smallish movie that hits just enough of the right notes.

"[46] James Berardinelli rated the film three out of four stars, and complimented the "old-fashioned" approach in storytelling, anchored by Edgar-Jones's "stellar performance".

"[31] /Film's Haoi-Tran Bui rated the film a six out of ten and wrote, "thanks to a guileless and steely central performance by Edgar-Jones, Where the Crawdads Sing manages to find some harmony between its melodramatic swings and its slow-building mystery.

"[49] Harry Guerin, multimedia journalist for RTÉ, gave the film three out of five stars, and said it is "always watchable" but "loses some goodwill by shoe-horning too much into the third act and moving too quickly towards the credits.

"[50] Pat Padua of The Washington Post described the film as "Southern-fried The Blue Lagoon meets Murder, She Wrote—and topped off with a sprinkling of To Kill a Mockingbird," in which Edgar-Jones "convincingly" portrays the protagonist's "haunted shyness."

"[53] Peter Bradshaw, in his one-star review in The Guardian, described Where the Crawdads Sing as an "uncompromisingly terrible southern gothic schmaltzer [...] a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks" and termed Kya as a "Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect".