Kritiken

Where the Crawdads Sing has its feet firmly planted in Oscar-bait territory, dancing to all the emotional beats you’d expect from such an offering, and as safe and baggy as any of the most underwhelming Best Picture nominees of recent times.

Instead of a complicated protagonist at the centre of an atmospheric thriller Edgar-Jones seems trapped in an ill-advised antebellum-themed Taylor Swift music video...

When it’s focusing on being a murder mystery and a story of resilience and survival, Where The Crawdads Sings is still a bit overrought, but I found it utterly engrossing. Far less successful is the romantic storyline...

Unfortunately, as adapted by Luci Alibar, directed by Olivia Newman, photographed by Polly Morgan and produced by Reese Witherspoon, it’s become disappointingly banal, evoking memories of sappy Nicholas Sparks’ novels...

Witherspoon has called the book a “love letter to growing up in the South,” and the film appears to be striving for the same mood of nobility. But it could stand to be more florid; for a movie set amid marshes and swamps, Where the Crawdads Sing is surprisingly airless.

The movie is resolutely faithful to the incidents of the novel, but it doesn’t seem particularly interested in standing on its own, in being a movie. It feels like an illustration more than an adaptation.

Where the Crawdads Sing certainly embraces its source material’s flair for melodrama, serving up a slice of Southern-fried cheese that has been thoroughly coated and breaded in corn-pone bullshit.

[T]his stupefyingly bad big screen adaptation plays out as if Nicholas Sparks rewrote "To Kill a Mockingbird" and took out all the racial elements.

Beautiful shots of marshland and a solid leading performance by Daisy Edgar-Jones aren't enough to save Where the Crawdads Sing from itself.

Where the Crawdads Sing is an overcast, mediocre adaptation with a few spells of lightning but little in terms of risk.

The real mystery, though, is the massive appeal of Owens’ novel—which has sold more than 12 million copies to become one of the bestselling titles of all time—and whether that appeal can be replicated onscreen.

The movie has a careless, over-lit quality, and its director, Olivia Newman, doesn’t bring any mystique to the Louisiana locations that stand in for North Carolina.