Ddirected by Olivia Newman and produced by Reese Witherspoon, The Swamp Girl (broadcast this evening at 9.30pm on Rai 1) is a film based on one of the most sensational bestsellers of recent years (Delia Owens wrote it; unfortunately the transposition is not up to the standard of the good novel). The heroine of the story is played by the British actress Daisy Edgar Jones, a girl accused of murdering her ex (played in turn by Harris Dickinson; now growing greatly thanks to the role of the master in Babygirlalongside Nicole Kidman).
The Swamp Girlthe plot of the film premiering on Rai 1 based on the novel by Delia Owens
Catherine “Kya” Clark (Edgar-Jones) is a girl growing up in a remote swamp in North Carolina in the early 1950s. As a child she was abandoned by her parents and older siblings and since then she has learned to fend for herself. As a teenager, she became friends with Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) who teaches her to read and write: she ends up falling madly in love with him. But the boy has to go to college and Kya is left alone once again.
Shortly after, she meets Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) and begins a relationship with him. The boy even goes so far as to propose marriage to her but he doesn’t keep his promises and so Kya leaves him. Chase, however, does not accept the end of the story, he attacks her and even tries to rape her but Kya manages to escape.
Some time later, while the girl is out of town, Chase is found dead and Kya is involved in a murder trialwith some evidence against her that seems overwhelming. A now retired lawyer, Tom Milton (David Strathairn), decides to help her and to defend it in court. Meanwhile, Tate returns to town and doesn’t know whether or not to believe in his innocence.
Daisy Edgar-Jones in a scene from “The Swamp Girl”. (Warner Bros)
A cloying and unoriginal melodrama
Based on the bestseller of the same name by Delia Owensreleased in 2018, and produced by Reese Witherspoon, The Swamp Girl it’s a film that mixes disparate genres: melodrama, detective story and legal drama. The result is not the most convincing, given the lack of a precise logical thread to link such different elements.
Unlike the novelalmost entirely focused on the crime story, director Olivia Newman chooses to focus heavily on the romantic part of the story. The film becomes like this a sappy young adult romance drama as if they are seen far too many in recent years. All films are carbon copies, even in the temporal structure full of flashbacks, of The pages of our life with Ryan Gosling.
However, the good interpretation of Daisy Edgar-Jones remains to give meaning to the operation, young actress launched by the miniseries Normal Peopletaken from the novel Normal people by Sally Rooney. Her Kya, a fragile and determined girl at the same time, is a complex character to which Jones manages to restore all the nuances of the pages of Delia Owens. Worth notingin the soundtrack, the beautiful song Carolinawritten specifically for the film by Taylor Swift.
Also in the cast is Harris Dickinson, co-star of Babygirl with Nicole Kidman
Born and raised in London in 1996, Harris Dickinson is one of the hottest (and sexiest) young actors of recent years. At 17 he abandoned film and theater school with the idea of making a career in the Royal Marines but then changed his mind and resumed his acting studies.
In 2017 he made his cinema debut with Beach Ratssuccessfully presented at the Sundance Film Festival, then the following year he joined the cast of the series Trust where he plays the role of John Paul Getty III. The turning point comes in 2022 when director Ruben Östlund chooses him as the protagonist of Triangle of Sadnessa film that won the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for three Oscars.
Very soon, next January 30th, he will return to Italian screens with Babygirlan erotic film presented at the last Venice Film Festival where Harris co-stars with Nicole Kidman. The story? That of a young intern, Dickinson, who begins a murky sadomasochistic relationship with his boss (Kidman). A film full of eroticism and sensuality that made Nicole Kidman win the Volpi Cup in Venice for Best Female Performance.
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