The Marsh King’s Daughter: Caught in the Boggy Mess

In the tense thriller The Marsh King’s Daughter, a woman with a secret past will venture into the wilderness she left behind to confront the most dangerous man she’s ever met: her father. In the film, Helena’s (Daisy Ridley) seemingly ordinary life hides a dark and dangerous truth: her estranged father is the infamous Marsh King (Ben Mendelsohn), the man who kept her and her mother captive in the wilderness for years. When her father escapes from prison, Helena will need to confront her past. Knowing that he will hunt for her and her family, Helena must find the strength to face her demons and outmaneuver the man who taught her everything she knows about surviving in the wild.

REVIEW:

The Marsh King’s Daughter doesn’t take anything but the title from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

It’s a grim moodily shot thriller set partly in the marshes and river valleys of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and partly in a suburban American Dream where the main characters inner angst and fear that the beauty and terror of her survivalist upbringing will upend her life. That past is her father, Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn). He kidnapped her mother, dragged her out to the marsh, impregnated her.

The child, Helena ( a young Brooklyn Prince and than Daisy Ridley as an adult) is treated kindly but in a cool tutorial way by Jacob, taught how to hunt and given tattoos that mark both her successes and failures. The mother is cold and taciturn whenever Jacob is around and warm and gentle with Helena when he’s not. It feels like a hard-boiled version of Little House on the Prairie is being told.

When the outside world intrudes in the person of a lost four wheeler who is killed by Jacob, Helena and the mother escape. Jacob is later apprehended, convicted and incarcerated for his crimes. Decades later, in the present, Helena has married, has a daughter and a somewhat happy life where the world does not know of her past. Her greatest fear happens when Jacob escapes from prison. A cat and mouse thriller ensues.

Ridley and Mendelson are playing updated iterations of the good and bad characters found in fairy tales, and its modern equivalent- The Star Wars franchise. Ridley played Jedi inheritor Ray in the latest Star Wars extensions. Mendelson played Orson Krennic in Rogue One, a weapons designer and researcher for the evil empire. This is the director, Neil Burger taking advantage of their accustomed screen personas.

Mendelson is particularly good at hiding that evil side for the film’s first half, slipping shakily between the bad and good in the second when his deceitful technique needs to be shown as a rogue tactic. I was just waiting for him to slip up in the second when brief flashbacks show Helena following the survival lessons he taught her.

Ridley is effective as Helena, a character with a secret past. I liked how she tenuously lives in the present, developing coping strategies to keep her trauma and hidden persona at bay. Later, when her paranoid preservation instincts force her to apply her wilderness lessons, it’s fully satisfying despite the cliches of the genre.