The Marsh King's Daughter
                               
Director: Neil Burger
Year: 2023
Rating: 5.5
An odd film starring Daisy Ridley that I never quite got in rhythm with right from the beginning until the final fifteen minutes which gets quite tense and suspenseful. Though Ridley as the actress doesn't show up until 25-minutes in, she is great - a lot of drama and physicality to chew on.  She seems to get battered and bruised in a lot of her films. This suffers from the often-used device of the villain being able to get in anywhere and survive almost anything. This could have played out in other ways and I am not sure I really buy how it does,



The first thing that threw me off for a while was the setting and period of the film. I assumed that it was taking place in an early period - perhaps the early 1900s and the setting in the unexplored wilderness. The title seems to suggest such. Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn) and his small family of a wife (Caren Pistorius) and small daughter Helena (Brooklyn Prince later to become Daisy) live in an isolated cabin in the woods near the marshes living off the land through hunting and old-fashioned survival skills. The father and Helena have a very close relationship as he teaches her how to hunt and to understand the land. She loves him. Not so much her mother who rarely smiles. Nothing though is as it seems. The mother escapes with Helena and we realize it is set in modern times and that the mother was a prisoner of the father for years. Helena wants to go back to the father - she loved her life in the wilderness and the tattoos that he inked on her body like awards or punishments.



But she is unable to and in a big off-putting time jump it is suddenly 20-years in the future and Helena has become a suburban mother with her own girl, husband and a job inputting data on a computer. Where did that little girl go? The spark is gone as she mingles with other housewives and plans things for her daughter. Where did her love for her father go? Somehow in the time, she has conformed and no longer idolizes her father. You never really understand why, what happened. But then of course the father shows up having broken out of prison and he wants another family - himself, Helena and the daughter. She has to dig deep inside and recall those skills she had - how to hunt, shoot and survive - and as he had taught her - Protect Your Family.