THE MARSH KING'S DAUGHTER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Marsh King's Daughter, Lionsgate / Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

It's almost inevitable—and just as disappointing—that The Marsh King's Daughter takes the third-act turn that it does. Material such as this, which is inherently about deep psychological wounds and how they return—if they ever left in the first place—to affect a woman's current life, requires a certain degree of patience and consideration for its characters. This movie hints at such an approach, but the plot, which gives our protagonist a physical manifestation of those old pains and trauma in the form of the perpetrator of them, is more important to the filmmakers.

We know they're capable of some degree of patience, because there is the setup of the premise—as well as, in certain ways, the build-up to the climax—to note here. Even those moments of unsettling calm and quiet, though, feel rushed. The whole movie is building toward a revelation and a showdown of some sort, and director Neil Burger wants us to know that at every moment. In that way, the movie is more or less incapable of being patient, because a sense of haste accompanies everything and everyone within it.

That includes one of those unnecessary flashes to a key moment later in the story (at least it's a vague one) at the very start. The real beginning of the tale follows a young Helena (Brooklynn Prince) and her parents, who live a secluded life off the land, deep in the woods, and in a cabin. Her father Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn) teaches her survival skills, mainly hunting, and how vital it is to defend one's life and the lives of one's family. He marks certain occasions, such as participating in her first successful deer hunt or failing to shoot a buck on her own, by tattooing his young daughter's body.

Something isn't right here. If that's not apparent from these details, the silence of Helena's mother (played by Caren Pistorius) says the rest. She's definitely not quiet when a lost stranger on a four-wheeler shows up randomly outside the cabin while Jacob is on a solo trek. The mother pleads for help, because Jacob abducted her years ago, and a protesting Helena and her mother escape to a nearby town.

A couple decades later, Helena, now played by Daisy Ridley, has a husband named Stephen (Garrett Hedlund), a daughter named Marigold (Joey Carson), and a made-up history, so that no one—including her new family—will know about her father. Since then, Jacob has been arrested, was dubbed "the Marsh King," and is serving a lengthy prison sentence. Helena just wants to leave all of that behind her, but Jacob's violent escape during a transfer brings all of it back to the fore.

From here, the screenplay, adapted from Karen Dionne's novel by Elle and Mark L. Smith, becomes of two minds. The first element, of course, has Helena directly confronting what happened to her, by way of some flashbacks, and adjusting to a degree of honesty with her family, including a reunion with her Sheriff stepfather Clark (Gil Birmingham), that she never thought was possible.

This is the admirable stuff of the movie, as Helena deals with having kept such a vital secret from her husband (It's appreciated that the guy doesn't become antagonistic toward her or to the story—just confused and a bit hurt that his wife didn't trust him with the information), realizes too late that her mother's feelings toward her weren't what she imagined, and discovers that she could have a loving, supportive family, even with everything that happened to her. Ridley's performance is commendably vulnerable, even making a scene in which Helena explains all of her tattoos to Stephen feel emotionally authentic, despite how oddly staged it is.

There's the second element of the narrative, though, and it comes to define the story's drive and purpose in a way that overshadows the first part. It has to do, obviously, with the fact that Jacob could be out there—and maybe even inside Helena's home at certain points. She becomes paranoid, hearing or imagining sounds and seeing clumps of dirt on the floor that might be as innocent as her daughter forgetting to wipe off her shoes. Whether or not Jacob is stalking Helena becomes the central question here, and for whatever resourcefulness and insight Helena displays to figure out if that's the case (It isn't much, by the way), what's lost about this character, her willingness to confront her past, and her capacity to move forward from it?

The sacrifice of those ideas isn't worth it, ultimately. The Marsh King's Daughter goes exactly where anyone might expect—physically, with a return to Helena's first home, and narratively, with a revelation so unsurprising that even the filmmakers can't bother to fake any feeling of it, and thematically, as our protagonist uses all of those childhood lessons in a game of survival (It's a good thing various weapons keep working after decades of minimal storage or being submerged in mud and water). There's definitely a better story between the lines of what's here, but instead, we're given the most predictable version of it.

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