There’s a key moment in The Marsh King’s Daughter, when Jacob (Ben Mendelssohn) hands his daughter Helena (Brooklynn Prince) a rifle and tells her to shoot a female wolf.  She takes aim but hesitates because a wolf cub is pawing at the ground.  Both wolves are starving, Jacob explains.  Helena lowers the rifle and asks, “What will become of the cub?”  Jacob says that the cub will starve and die, and tells her again to shoot the wolf.  Helena lowers the rifle once more, and the wolf edges closer.  Jacob grabs the rifle and shoots the wolf and its cub.  “You must always protect your family,” he tells her.  The next morning Helena scratches that message on a piece of wood that we later learn is a punishment pit.  Jacob has thrown her down there so that she will not make that mistake of choosing anything over the family ever again.  What Helena doesn’t know is that her “family” is built upon a monstrous lie, one that her father has spun to rationalize how he treats them.

The first part of the movie shows us what life was like for her as a child.  She lives in a cabin in the woods in the upper peninsula of Michigan.  (The movie was shot in Ontario, Canada, which qualifies as “close enough”.)  While her father teaches her hunting and survival skills, Helena’s mother (Caren Pistorius) handles the domestic chores back at the cabin.  Helena adores her father and takes to their rugged existence like a duck to water.  He teaches her how to track, how to shoot and gives her a tattoo whenever she either accomplishes something significant.  When Helena learned that her scent scared the deer just before she fired, Jacob gave her one to mark the event.  Helena has a lot of tattoos, so she evidently learned a lot from her father.

If Helena were a boy, she would excel as a Boy Scout.  (People would have called her a “tom boy” when I was growing up.)  Helena’s mother, however, is far less enamored with their rustic way of life.  She does all the cooking and cleaning while her husband and daughter go off on their adventures, so this isn’t a surprise.  Helena stumbles upon her father and her mother fighting and doesn’t comprehend what’s going on.  It’s only years later when realizes that mother was intent on leaving and Jacob stopped her and punished her.  Helena loved her father and the life they shared, so the idea that her mother would ever want to leave is incomprehensible to her.  This would not be the first time her mother would try to escape with her, though.

After Jacob leaves for one of his solo excursions, a man riding around in a four wheeler shows up.  He’s lost and since there’s no cell service there, he needs directions.  (Note to self: never ask for directions when you’re out in the woods alone.)  The man is shocked to see Helena and her mother because he’s never seen anyone living “way out here” before.   Mom pleads for him to take her and her daughter away, and her urgency shocks Helena.  While the man tries to understand what is happening, Jacob arrives and mortally wounds him.  Mom knocks a resistant  Helena unconscious and rides both of them away on the four wheeler.  

Helena and her mother eventually wind up at a police station, where a friendly officer named Clark (Gil Birmingham) tries to settle Helena down.  (Birmingham was equally good in a similar role in the Under the Banner of Heaven series.)  Mom tells Helena that her father abducted her years ago, and Helena says that she’s lying.  Helena is loyal to her father and breaks out of the station when she sees his signal.  They’re quickly surrounded by patrol cars before they can escape, however.  Jacob goes off to prison, while Helena and her mother undertake the difficult journey of forging a new life.

Fast forward twenty years and Helena works in an office as an accountant, which is as far removed from shooting and eating wild game as one can get.  She uses heavy makeup to hide the tattoos on visible areas of her body.  She’s married to Steven (Garrett Hedlund) and they have a daughter named Marigold (Joey Carson).  She’s kept her former life a secret for obvious reasons, changing her name so that she would no longer be connected to “The Marsh King”.   When Steven asks why she never told him, she said no boy would want to go out on a date  with the Marsh King’s daughter, who was convicted for kidnapping her mother and killing the man who stumbled upon their cabin.  It’s a fair point, but most single guys would gladly make an exception for a girl as pretty as Daisy Ridley.

Helena hasn’t kept everything from her previous life locked away, though.  Marigold is amazed at how her mom can identify every leaf and bird in the area.  Helena’s father taught her well, but she has a good life now and has put the past behind her.  Helena eventually learned that what her mother told her was the truth, that her father wasn’t protecting his family but was instead holding them captive.  Helena loved adventure and was too young to grasp what was actually happening to her and her mother.  She was her daddy’s girl, his “little shadow”, and everything he said was bond.

As often is the case with stories like these, the past has a way of forcing itself upon the present to be reckoned with.  Jacob escapes while being transported and his charred remains are found in a car.  Law enforcement believe he is dead but Helena knows her father too well.  When she discovers things in the house that could only have been left by her father, she leaves her family behind to confront him in the woods, alone.

If you’ve seen 2022’s Where the Crawdads Sing, you’ll probably have feelings of deja vu watching The Marsh King’s Daughter, at least initially.  While The Marsh King’s Daughter also shares an equally deep affection for the backwoods, the tenor of these movies couldn’t be more different.  Whereas Crawdads was an unabashed romantic melodrama, this movie is a suspense thriller.  In that regard, Marsh King is unsurprising and familiar, but did remind me of the similarly themed (and much better) Leave No Trace.

While nothing spectacular as a movie, Marsh King does have solid performances from Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelssohn working in its favor.  How interesting it is to see these Star Wars alumni outside of the blockbusters they’re known for.  (Mendelssohn also played a significant role as the member of the Skrull race in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)  Ridley’s performance here shows why she was chosen for the role of Rey in the first place.  As Helena, she’s able to bring out the character’s fearlessness and determination, with underlying notes of empathy and sensitivity.  She’s undeniably an engaging action movie heroine.  As Helena’s father, Mendelssohn is casually devious and a perfect villain.  The moment he smiles his insinuating smile, you know for sure you can’t trust him and that he’ll probably kill you.  Together, the two make the movie worth watching, reminding us how good they are when they play normal, Earthbound characters.  Mildly Recommended.

Analysis

What is a family?  This is a theme the movie teased at but never fully explores.  Helena is a member of several families throughout the story, and she’s never completely happy in any of them.  First is when Helena was a child.  She was happy to be part of that family and fought against being taken away from it.  When she learned the truth about the underlying dynamic of the situation, those years were tainted from that point on.  She was part of a family built upon lies, which effectively nullifies the entire experience, no matter how much fun that period of time was.

Next is when Helena’s mom married Gil.  (I’m assuming they were married because he’s referred to as Helena’s step father.)  Helena’s life with this family is quite different from the one she was taken away from, though.  This new life revolves around security and healing.  Helena is so convinced she wasn’t happy that she doesn’t remember a picture of herself and her mother smiling.  Eventually her mother commits suicide, and Helena effectively closes the door on that family.  She doesn’t see Gil until several years later, when situations demand it.

Lastly, Helena makes a family of her own.  Helena appears happy with this family, but it doesn’t feel right, either.  She never told Steven about her childhood and her father, so their relationship is built upon a lie of omission.  Certainly this lie is not as egregious as those Jacob told Helena when she was young, but Helena wasn’t truthful with her husband, either.  (She actually told him that her father died in a car accident.)  Helena does love her daughter, much in the same way her father loved her, but this family is built on similarly shaky ground.  After the truth comes out, Helena admits to Steven that she doesn’t know what world she belongs to, the suburbs or the backwoods.  Fortunately for her, Steven doesn’t want to leave and asks her to let him in.  Unfortunately, the movie abandons this aspect of the story when it switches into action mode.  The movie seemed primed to make a grand statement about families but never does.

Along those lines, the movie never provides any insight into why Jacob held Helena’s mother against her will.  Was it purely a matter of pride for him, a “no woman is going to run out on me and take my daughter with her” reaction?  Or was he acting out of some childhood experience that shaped him into the monster he became?  The movie never offers an answer as to why Jacob does what he does, which is strange because it is very thorough in explaining why Helena is walled-off and untrusting as an adult.

I mentioned above how good Daisy Ridley is in the role of Helena.  She’s feminine, vulnerable, tough and determined.  Ridley has always had an appealing screen presence, but she gets to do more in this movie than in her blockbusters.  She plays the movie’s quiet scenes with nuance and introspection.  When Helena is thinking, you see the internal calculations going on, that she’s weighing the outcomes.  Of course, this level of acting is impossible when you’re swinging a lightsaber.  The Marsh King’s Daughter is not a great movie and is barely a good movie, but I hope that it takes Ridley’s career into a direction she’s happy with.  I don’t know how much of the stunt work she did in this movie, but she’s the most convincing runner outside of Tom Cruise.  If only they made big budget espionage movies for women.  Zoe Saldana would undoubtedly sympathize.

Mendelssohn is also good as Jacob, equal parts shifty and swarthy.  Honestly, he can play a role like this in his sleep.  I feel bad that I only remember his performances in IP-driven blockbusters (Star Wars: Rogue One, Captain Marvel, Ready Player One).  He’s an actor that would have done very well in the old studio system.  He would have become famous playing all sorts of bad guys, from well-dressed gangsters to skid row derelicts.  He reminds me a lot of Peter Lorre, an actor who always seemed to play characters from the wrong side of the tracks.  Directors must love having Mendelssohn in their movies because he brings so much to a part that isn’t in the screenplay.  At least with this movie he has an actual character to play.  

Lastly, Garrett Hedlund did a nice job with the thankless role as the put-upon spouse.  He’s primarily bounced around since headlining Tron: Legacy thirteen years ago.  When he first appeared on screen I thought he was Austin Butler.  The two of them should play brothers sometime, because the ladies would go nuts with that pairing.