Languid is a strange way to go for a psychological thriller, an even stranger way to go for an action thriller. But that’s how director Neil Burger plays it in The Marsh King’s Daughter, a misfire that looks like a bold experiment gone wrong.
There are a a number of people in the cast, among them Brooklynn Prince, Gil Birmingham, Caren Pistorius and Garrett Hedlund, but the only two that really matter are Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn, who play to their strengths – plucky and menacing respectively.
Helena is a girl (played at the point by Prince) being brought up brought up in the wilds and taught the ways of the woods by dad Jacob (Mendelsohn). Her mother Beth (Pistorius) is there, too, a permanently angry woman who cannot compete with Jacob when it comes to the affection of her daughter. What Helena doesn’t know is that her mother has a right to be angry. Jacob abducted Beth some years before and has held her here as a prisoner since.
Jump forward two decades and dad is in jail, Beth is dead, possibly a suicide, and Helena (now played by Ridley) is married and has a daughter with Stephen (Garrett Hedlund), a decent guy completely unaware of his wife’s past as the child of the infamous Marsh King.
Dad is obviously going to escape from jail and return for a second go at either Helena or her daughter, or both of them, that much seems set in stone, because the bulk of the movie’s running time is still ahead. And Helena, using the hunter’s and woodsman’s skills her father taught her decades before, is going to have to neutralise Jacob, in order to protect her family.
The interesting psychology at play is that the ignorant Helena loved her dad when she was a tot. Later, growing up with her mother, she found it difficult to square the stories about this monster with her feelings for him. The heart wants what it wants, and all that. And blood is thicker than water after all.
Imagine getting in Ben Mendelsohn, brilliant at twisted individuals, and keeping him largely off the screen. It leaves Ridley to do most of the work. And though she’s also brilliant, particularly at playing resourceful individuals – those Star Wars movies are a proof of that – there just isn’t enough for her to get her teeth into.
Neil Burger is a good director and adept at spicing up genre material. Limitless, Divergent and The Upside (the remake of the French movie Intouchables) are all evidence of that. But something has gone wrong here. Burger’s evocation of menace just doesn’t work. The lurking, crawling cameras, leisurely pacing and muted performances by everyone involved should convey a sense of escalating cold dread. And sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. There’s a magic ingredient missing, possibly something to do with the way Karen Dionne’s novel has been adapted. Possibly something in the edit suite.
Things do eventually snap and there’s a dash for the finish line in an all-action finale that sees dad and daughter finally squaring off against each other out in the woods where it all began. It is too little too late. And even at this late stage, when there’s every reason to get Mendelsohn onto the screen to do his menacing thing, Burger holds back, as if fearful that the film will tip too far away from his heroine.
All the ingredients are good but there’s something wrong with the proportions. The Marsh King’s Daughter is one for the fans of Ridley and Mendelsohn but the big-picture verdict is that it just doesn’t work.
The Marsh King’s Daughter – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
