Where the Crawdads Sing

**_The challenges of growing up (alone) in the shoreline swamps of the Carolinas_** In the 60s, a girl (Daisy Edgar-Jones) comes-of-age in coastal North Carolina, where she’s an outcast known as “the marsh girl.” When a local hotshot is found dead (Harris Dickinson), the community thinks she’s the culprit. Taylor John Smith plays a male friend and David Strathairn her lawyer. Based on the 2018 novel by Delia Owens, “Where the Crawdads Sing” (2022) is a meshing of “Cross Creek” (1983) with backwoods crime mystery, such as "Undertow" (2004), "Winter's Bone" (2010) and "Mud" (2012). It’s reminiscent of Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing comics of the 70s, just with the swamp monster being replaced by human monsters. The coastal swamp cinematography is awesome, but this wasn’t shot within 850 miles of the shores of North Carolina. It was filmed in Houma and New Orleans, Louisiana The movie runs 2 hours, 5 minutes. GRADE: B+/A-