In the opening of Neil Burger’s The Marsh King’s Daughter, based on Karen Dionne’s 2017 novel of the same name, it’s not the king or his daughter who first captivates us but the marsh itself. As the film begins, the camera crawls through the reeds growing in the swamps of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, capturing scuttling bugs and twisting branches in loving close-ups while the softest sunlight breaks in between the trees and ethereal music echoes in the air. Recalling Terrence Malick’s films, the moment paints the marshlands as a kind of paradise.
We’re immediately drawn into the world as it exists to young Helena Holbrook (Brooklynn Prince). The hunter-gatherer existence that defines Helena and her family is the only one she’s ever known. For Helena, the marshlands are a place of comfort and wonder. This is largely because her father, Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn), raised her to thrive in this environment.
We first catch sight of Jacob from Helena’s point of view, the camera gazing up at him. With his shaggy hair and piercing blue eyes, Jacob cuts an almost beatific figure standing in the sunlight with a rifle slung over his shoulder. And as Helena dashes out to accompany him on his latest hunting trip, it’s clear that she regards him as nothing less than a hero.
Mendelsohn earns this admiration too, playing Jacob with a kind of soulful sternness that would have any child longing for the man’s approval. Jacob coaches Helena through their hunt, issuing instructions that are tough but never cruel. And when they return home, Jacob adds another symbol to the collection of marks that litter his and his daughter’s bodies. These stick-and-poke tattoos are designed to commemorate important moments: a stag on her neck for her first successful hunt, a tree on her wrist for the shot that she missed, and so on. It’s a bizarre ritual but one performed so lovingly that, in the moment, it seems almost sweet.
It’s this matter of perception on which The Marsh King’s Daughter turns. One day, when Jacob is out hunting, a stranger (Joshua Peace) stumbles upon their cabin. His ATV comes crashing into their peaceful world like some abomination, a loud and ugly contortion of metal and plastic. But just as we begin to worry about the threat this outsider might pose, Helena’s mother, Beth (Caren Pistorious), runs screaming toward him, begging him to help her and Helena escape from the monstrous man who’s kept them trapped out here in the marshes all these years.
It’s a devastating turn of events that sees Jacob sent to prison and leaves Helena wondering if her whole life has been a lie. The Marsh King’s Daughter then fast-forwards some 20 years to the sight of a grown-up Helena (now played by Daisy Ridley), her tattoos covered with makeup as she sits in an anonymous office building, punching numbers into a computer. The artificial lighting and buzzing electronics of this place immediately feel so much colder, dimmer, and less alive than the world she left behind in the marshlands all those years ago.
There are, though, bright spots to her new life, namely her kind-eyed husband, Stephen (Garrett Hedlund), and their precocious young daughter, Marigold (Joey Carson). She’s made a good life for herself, but Helena finds her mind irrevocably drawn back to the marshlands and things left unresolved. So when news comes through that Jacob has escaped from prison, Helena is soon borne back to the marshlands to face her father and confront the ghosts of her past.
The later portions of The Marsh King’s Daughter play out much more conventionally than its gorgeous beginning, while still maintaining the opening stretch’s languid pacing. The film initially turns into a kind of paranoid home-invasion thriller, with Helena increasingly convinced that Jacob will come for her and Marigold—rushing between rooms, locking doors and windows, freaking out at every little sign of possible intrusion. She then decides to turn the hunter into the hunted and go looking for him out in the marshlands, using the skills he taught her to track him down. As she searches, we hear Jacob’s lessons through voiceover narration.
When Helena does finally find her father, there’s little payoff to be had. Their reunion triggers a few additional flashbacks as Helena remembers aspects of her childhood that don’t quite gel with the sun-dappled vision that The Marsh King’s Daughter previously offered up. These dark truths come as a shock to Helena, but we can’t really share in her surprise because by now we’ve already seen Jacob brutally murder people on a couple of occasions, and we fully understand what sort of person he really is. So by the time we get to the conclusion, there’s no ambiguity left to Helena’s tale, and so we’re left waiting for her to catch up with us.
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