BOOK BY ITS COVER (WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING)

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

Fifteen million copies and counting...

Delia Owens' 2018 murder mystery novel 'Where The Crawdads Sing' has been a publishing sensation ever since it was championed by Reece Witherspoon and the US bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble.

Set in the fictional town of Barkley Cove in North Carolina, the novel created the kind of buzz that 'The Bridges of Madison County,' 'Gone Girl' or 'The Girl On The Train' received.

So it came as no surprise when Witherspoon snapped up the rights along with Lauren Neustadter.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

The only surprise was that Witherspoon resisted the temptation to direct or star in it herself.

Olivia Newman, who made the little seen but well received 2018 Netflix wrestling movie 'First Match,' was chosen instead to direct, while up and coming English actress Daisy Edgar Jones was given the plum lead part of the marsh girl Maya.

With 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' scriptwriter Lucy Allibar on board to adapt Owens' novel, hopes were high in Columbia and Sony Pictures for the film's release this year.

And so those hopes has proven to be well founded.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

Newman and Allibar's big screen version of Owens' novel has been a big success.

Made on a $24 million budget, it has taken over $140 million at the box office at a time when audiences have been tentatively returning to cinemas following two years of COVID enforced lockdowns.

In some respects, it's success is not entirely surprising.

'Where The Crawdads Sing' was always going to have a ready made audience of readers curious to see how it has ended up onscreen.

But does the adaptation do justice to Owens' book?

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

At the start of Newman's movie, the body of Harris Dickinson's Chase Andrews is discovered by police and local boys out in the North Carolina marshes.

Locals suspect Edgar Jones' Catherine 'Kya' Clark is responsible because of her wild ways and the fact she was dating the popular high school quarterback.

Newman and Allibar go back to the roots of the local townsfolk's suspicions, revealing the hardship Kya endured as a child.

Living in a shack on the marshes in the 1950s with her dysfunctional family, she witnesses her mum Julienne, played by Ahna O'Reilly, leave because she can no longer take her fisherman husband's heavy drinking and gambling anymore.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

One by one siblings also quit, leaving JoJo Regina's younger version of Kya to fend for herself while living with Garrett Dillahunt's destructive Pa, Jackson Clark.

She mostly survives by keeping out of harm's way - although Jackson does teach her how to be self sufficient on the marshes before also leaving her.

Kya also survives with the help of Barkley Cove's kind store owners, Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr's Mabel and James 'Jumpin' Madison - selling them mussels in return for basic groceries.

An attempt to get her to go to school goes disastrously, so Kya pretty much learns about surviving in the world she encounters around the marshlands.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

However, with developers interested in the land around the family homestead, Kya, even in her late teens as played by Daisy Edgar Jones, has to keep one step ahead of social services.

Known locally as "The Marsh Girl," she uses her knowledge of the marshes to hide from them. 

Kya also befriends Taylor John Smith's Tate Walker who is slightly older and who she originally encountered as a child.

Intrigued by Kya, he offers to help her learn to read, write and count and they bond over their appreciation of nature.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

Inevitably Kya and Tate fall in love but his parents have greater ambitions for him.

When Tate leaves for college, he promises to return to Kya on the Fourth of July.

However when he breaks his promise to Kya, in Tate's absence she befriends Chase Andrews who is also intrigued by her.

When Chase is not wooing her, Kya has started to document the nature she sees around her in a journal, with striking illustrations of what she sees.

Chase has little appreciation of what she is doing and pays lip service.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

When Tate returns after a year away, Kya is angry with how he has broken his word.

She also ends her relationship with Chase after learning he has been seeing another local girl who he is engaged to.

Encouraged by Tate to use her knowledge of the marshes to earn money, Kya's drawings and writings about nature attract the interest of publishers and generate income.

Her brother, Logan Macrae's Jodie also returns, informing her her mother has passed away.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

And with Chase still bothering her and then unsuccessfully trying to rape her, she is overheard by local fishermen threatening to kill him if he ever tries to do it again.

This inevitably leads to Kya becoming the chief suspect when Chase ends up dead near a fire tower.

Kya is swiftly arrested.

However the rush to have Kya convicted disturbs David Strathairn's local attorney Tom Milton who volunteers to act as her defence.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

But will he be able to sway a jury in a town that seems to have already made up its mind about Kya?

Newman and her screenwriter Allibar have delivered a robust, if conservative adaptation of Owens' novel which follows the typical beats of dramas of this nature.

They elicit decent performances from Edgar Jones, Dillahunt, Smith, Dickinson, Hyatt, Macer Jr, Macrae and always compelling Strathairn.

However there is nothing pretty remarkable about the plot or the way it is executed onscreen.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

Viewers will immediately see it as 'To A Kill A Mockingbird' fused with elements of 'Beasts of the Southern Wild,' 'The Notebook' and, for the more eclectic, John Sayles' 'Passion Fish'.

It is undoubtedly prettily shot by English cinematographer Polly Morgan.

However neither Newman nor her writer not her cinematographer push the material hard enough to do anything really daring.

Their approach is to deliver a "steady as you go" adaptation and that's okay because they do a pretty decent job doing just that.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

Audiences will, by and large, be content with what they have delivered.

Film fanatics will wish they had the drive to do more.

But if 'Where The Crawdads Sing' proves two things, it is that post 'Normal People' Edgar Jones can, like Paul Mescal in 'Aftersun,' carry a movie.

It also confirms that Strathairn remains one of the best character actors around - not that that fact should ever have been in doubt.

© Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures

Watching the two of them engage each other onscreen is one of the film's strongest assets.

While a few of us will pine for something a bit more from Newman's film, that is just enough to make us care.

('Where The Crawdads Sing' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on 2022)