‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ movie review: Daisy Ridley anchors provocative thriller

A young mother is confronted by her after her murderous father breaks out of prison in The Marsh King’s Daughter, which opens this weekend in Prague cinemas. This adaptation of Karen Dionne’s 2017 novel by director Neil Burger may confound viewers expecting a traditional thriller, but its thought-provoking premise

Helena (Daisy Ridley) feels a rose-tinted nostalgia for her childhood living in a cabin in the woods; even though mom Beth (Caren Pistorius) was a bit standoffish, dad Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn) taught her well in the ways of the wild, how to hunt deer and protect the family from wolves. Only problem: dad was also a predator who had kidnapped Beth from society and raised Helena in unknowing captivity for the first decade of her life.

Early scenes in The Marsh King’s Daughter show us a happy young Helena (played by Brooklynn Prince) as she bonds with her father through her formative years, and cannily presents Jacob in a sentimental light. Even after we know what he’s done, the movie has painted him through his daughter’s lens; he may be a monster, but he’s also a father, and a human, and shares common emotions and experiences with the rest of us.

Twenty years later, Jacob is a more traditional Michael Myers kind of monster as he breaks out of prison and leaves multiple bodies in his path. That’s bad news for Helena, who now has a family of her own; while she’s carefully hid her past from husband Stephen (Garrett Hedlund) and daughter Marigold (Joey Carson), the cat is out of the bag once FBI agents show up at her front door.

We expect Jacob to head for his daughter, and for Helena to finally employ those survivalist skills that have been going to waste at her data entry job to finally take him down. But while that’s what might happen in the usual thriller, The Marsh King’s Daughter is more interested in its characters and their motivations. For Jacob, Helena may be the last notion tying him to a human world. And while Helena may fear her father’s return, she also has a desire to finally confront her past.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is not a perfect movie: in its final scenes, it becomes that predictable thriller that the preceding film has so carefully navigated away from. There’s a perspective-shift flashback that reveals that Jacob may not have been the perfect father that Helena remembers, but both she and the audience should already be acutely aware of this, and spelling it out so bluntly ruins some of the nuance that the movie had built up to that point.

Still, it’s unusual to see material of such depth in what may have otherwise been molded into the usual thriller. It’s a fascinating premise: how the lies and hate that that colored our worldview during our formative years leave a lasting impact, and may be difficult to confront and overcome. One assumes that Dionne’s novel dealt more more intimately with the thematic material than this 100-minute film.

Still, in the hands of director Burger, working from a script by screenwriters Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Elle Smith, The Marsh King’s Daughter manages to do the material justice. While there are the expected fireworks by the finale, it’s an emotional embrace that leaves the biggest impact.

Ridley, who portrays a complex character with careful precision, is the real standout here; her climactic scenes with Mendelsohn (also good, if miscast – a more traditionally empathetic actor would have helped better sell the film’s central theme) that cement The Marsh King’s Daughter as something at least a little special. This movie won’t satisfy those looking for fast thrills and easy answers, but its likely to stay with you long after the credits have rolled.