Where the Crawdads Sing

The North Carolina marsh in Olivia Newman’s film is Louisiana. Shooting started on 30 March 2021, Houma stood in for the invented town of Barkley Cove, the beach is a stretch of Lake Pontchartrain and the lagoon a bend of the Tchefuncte River. Kya’s shack was built in Fairview-Riverside State Park at Madisonville because Newman refused a soundstage: she wanted the camera to carry straight from inside the house to the water. B camera operator Grayson Austin gathered so much wildlife footage that Newman says a marsh documentary could be cut from it. The song came before the film. Taylor Swift had read the novel years earlier and wrote and sang Carolina before production began; it won an MTV award, was nominated at the Golden Globes and the Grammys, and made the Oscar shortlist without reaching the ballot. The numbers vindicated it: $144.3 million worldwide against a $24 million budget, $90.2 million of that in the United States and Canada. Reviews were largely unkind, yet the CinemaScore grade from ticket buyers was an A minus. A good fit if you want real water and real wildlife rather than a swamp built on a stage. Not for you if you expect a woman raised alone to look it; Laura Miller of Slate found this Kya too well turned out.