Now available in Hulu (in addition to renting or purchasing on VOD services such as Prime Video), Where the crabs sing was a rock-solid box office hit at the end of the pandemic, grossing $122 million worldwide, proving that mid-budget adult films can still have life beyond streaming. It helps that it’s based on Delia Owens’ best-selling novel (15 million copies sold) set in the swamps of the East Coast, where a local scoundrel turns up dead and all fingers point at the local lone woman, played by Daisy Edgar. Jones (who is having quite a year, considering that we have already seen her in the horror comedy. Cool and prestigious television series Under the banner of heaven). But will the film offer anything to audiences who haven’t yet been wooed by the book’s charms?
WHERE THE CROWDADS SING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: BACKLEY COVE, NORTH CAROLINA, 1969. It’s a wild place. Marshy. Wet. Remote. Beautiful. Two children see something: a body. A man. Dead. In the mud. At the foot of an old, dilapidated fire tower. Near where Marsh Girl lives. The Marsh Girl, real name Kya Clark (Edgar-Jones). We hear her voice through narration: “A swamp knows everything about death,” things like that. She lives here alone. The townspeople laugh at her. I bet the woodland weirdo did it. Who else would do it? The police investigate the death and her comments convey all kinds of things. From the dead man: “The best quarterback this town ever had.” They visit Kya’s house, see her collections of feathers and her wildlife drawings: “Is she a scientist or a witch?” Are they police or just idiots?
They take Kya inside. She barely says a word. A kind man visits her cell. A lawyer, Tom Milton (David Strathairn). He says he will help her. Flashback: 1953. Kya (Jojo Regina) is maybe eight or nine years old. Her Paw (Garret Dillahunt) is a horrible, horrible man who brutally beats her, her mother, and her group of siblings. They all leave, and she is left with the drunk and miserable Paw, stomping tenderly until he too leaves. She is resilient, however. She defends herself. She finds a knife, harvests mussels, and sells them to local shops, Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt). They are warm, friendly. Mabel suggests that Kya try school. She does. She is rejected and ridiculed. She never comes back. She has no shoes or clean clothes. Does she have running water? I don’t believe it. Will anyone in this plot do the right or logical thing?
No, because if they did, the plot would not happen as its creators want. There’s a scene where a man from Social Services asks Mabel and Jumpin’ about Kya, and they lie a little until he leaves. They deduce that a group home would be worse for an eight-year-old with no shoes, supervision, or education living alone in the swamp and shelling mussels to survive. I’m not so sure about that, but I admit it’s a tough decision. But Mabel gets her a pair of shoes. Now we return to adult Kya in the jail cell. Does she want to take a plea deal? No way. And then we go back to 1962, when she’s a teenager and she meets the nicest guy, Tate (Taylor John Smith). She love watching wildlife; They exchange the feathers they find and rub their lips amid a swirl of falling leaves. He teaches her to read and write and they fall in love and he is gentle, very gentle, but then he too goes off to college and breaks a promise. Heart. Broken.
We then cut to scenes in a courtroom where kindly lawyer Tom pokes holes in the prosecution’s case while a sad-faced Kya scribbles birds in a notebook. Then we go back to 1968 – we’re catching up, see. He meets Chase (Harris Dickinson). We know who Chase is: he’s the greatest Backley Cove footballer of all time. I don’t know about this guy though. He’s a little rude, but he plays a bad harmonica. Tate was almost perfect; Chase is decidedly imperfect. But as Kya narrates: “I no longer felt alone and that seemed enough to me.” Does he seem too much to anyone else? We know a shitbird when we see one, right?
What movies will it remind you of?: crabs does not awaken the mystical vibes of the deep south like Mud He does it, but he tries a little. It’s also like The notebook if her modest charms had been bitten by a swamp alligator.
Performance worth seeing: Does anyone believe that Edgar-Jones is a semi-feral woman living in an isolated shack in a swamp? She plays the character as the school wallflower from an ’80s teen sex comedy who’s targeted by the bad jock and rescued by the good guy, but with a little more mud between her toes. That leaves us highlighting Strathairn, who enjoys a couple of serious moments even though the script does him no favors.
Memorable dialogue: Kya: “I know feathers. The other girls don’t know feathers.”
Sex and skin: A couple of light PG-13 sex scenes; a pretty serious incident of PG-13 sexual assault.
Our opinion: Burning question: Do crayfish (or, not to be colloquial, crayfish) make noise? The Internet says they have an appendage, a scaphognathite, through which they make small noises like clicking and bubbling. No singing, no humming, not a single note. But I’m being literal, and “where the crabs sing” is a metaphor for Kya’s place of refuge, where she will escape from cruel and violent men. Delving into this awkward “look at me, I’m-LITERARY” device only makes these shallow waters murkier: is the place where the crabs sing an actual physical place somewhere deep in the swamp where all the beloved birds and birds live? Kya bugs? A place within the mind of security or psychological strength? Is that where he could supposedly murder one of those cruel men? Or is “Where the Crabs Sing” an attempt to fish a capital-S symbol out of the mire of a half-considered faux-belletristic narrative swamp? (Be thankful: it could have been called Where humpbacks hump.)
I’m trying here, really. But there’s not much substance to this quasi-Gothic melodrama beyond vague screeches about the cruelties of 20th-century American civilization. Toxic Masculinity Is Very Important: Buncha Crawls Around! Marginalization is another: gossips and insults suck! There’s something vaguely related to the ugly racial dynamics of the time: Mabel and Jumpin’ are black, and they’re also outsiders! Women have to be strong: Look at Kya, she is very strong! She somehow also knows how to do makeup despite being isolated from society for a decade and a half. She must have learned that off-screen, between all those narrative jumps in time. Maybe Mabel, who is like a mother to her, more or less, or at least it’s almost implied, or the movie wants it to be implied, but doesn’t try too hard to imply it, because there’s too much plot to resolve.
Speaking of plot, crabs It is a three-headed monster: detective novel, romance and courtroom drama. The first plays out like a trite routine, not a nail-biting cliffhanger. The second is schmaltz with a distinctive seal. The third is toothless and simplistic. Director Olivia Newman is very comfortable with clichés: the police find some fibers on the body that match a hat found in Kya’s house. Kya and Tate relax on the beach as the waves wash over them. The gallery in the room gasps with each revelation. We roll our eyes and maybe even laugh out loud at some of this garbage, all cheesy, melodramatic, and vaguely maudlin. However, we follow it to the end, not because we are interested in the characters and their well-being, but simply to see what happens, to see if the conclusion is as unconvincing as all the previous scenes. And lo and behold, it is. The crayfish are in misery here. They don’t sing, they just scream in pain.
Our call: Beneath the muck of the swamp, the crabs click on the bubble through their scaphognathites, an instinctive and urgent primal message coming from deep within their DNA: SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
