The Marsh King’s Daughter by Neil Burger is released

Neil Burger’s The Swamp King’s Daughter, an adaptation of Karen Dionne’s best-selling novel of the same name, is being released. The role of a woman who has to literally escape from the trap of her past was played by the star of the new “Star Wars” Daisy Ridley. Tells Julia Shagelman.

The title of the film, like the book on which the script is based, is, of course, borrowed from the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. And the picture also begins like a forest fairy tale from some ancient time. The girl Helena (Brooklyn Prince) lives in a hut in the swamps with her hunter father (Ben Mendelsohn) and quiet, withdrawn mother (Karen Pistorius), without electricity and generally any signs of civilization except her father’s guns. She hardly talks to her mother – for some reason she is almost always in a bad mood and cannot tell the girl anything interesting. But dad is a real hero, strong and brave. He teaches Helena to understand plants, read animal tracks, takes her hunting and puts Indian tattoos on her body, telling her about their meaning.

Father and daughter are practically inseparable, she follows him in all his affairs, so he calls her Ponytail. Perhaps some of his instructions may seem too harsh for a ten-year-old girl, such as “There is nothing more honest than the survival instinct” or “You must always protect your family,” but they are dictated by the harsh world of wildlife around, and Helena accepts them unquestioningly.

But one day her calm life collapses. When the father once again goes hunting, this time alone, telling her to wait for him, a stranger on a motorcycle appears near their hut – an unprecedented thing in these parts. He gets lost and asks you to show him the way. Suddenly, the passive and inconspicuous mother grabs Helena and begs the stranger to take them away from here. While the girl fights back and the man tries to understand what is going on, Helena’s father appears and kills him, but the woman and girl manage to escape. In the city, it turns out that Helena’s whole fairy-tale life was a deception: it turns out that her father once kidnapped her mother and kept her in his hut by force, and she herself was born in captivity.

Twenty years later, an adult Helena (Daisy Ridley) works as an accountant, hides tattoos under long sleeves and high collars, and crease marks on her face under heavy makeup. She has a teacher husband (Garrett Hedlund), who is sure that his wife’s parents died in a car accident, and a little daughter, Marigold (Joey Carson), to whom she reads bedtime stories. Helena does not like to remember the past – until the day when her father, nicknamed the Swamp King in the press, escapes during a transfer from one prison to another, killing two guards. Now she can’t sleep peacefully at night, knowing that he will come back for her.

“The Swamp King’s Daughter” is one of those films whose production dragged on for years. The film adaptation of Karen Dionne’s book was first announced back in 2018. At that time, she was credited with the Norwegian director Morten Tyldum, who attracted the attention of Hollywood with the thriller “Headhunters” (2011) based on Jo Nesbø, and in 2014, who directed the Alan Turing biopic “The Game,” which later received eight Oscar nominations, but was extremely boring. in imitation”, and Alicia Vikander as the leading actress. However, the planned filming never began; both of them dropped out of the project in 2021 and were replaced by Neil Burger and Daisy Ridley. The film, completed in 2021, waited another two years for release, and at the very last moment its release was postponed another two weeks to avoid competition with the concert film of superstar Taylor Swift.

The genre of the film in the announcements is designated as a thriller, but Burger, who shot, among other things, the fantasy melodrama “The Illusionist” (2005) with Edward Norton, the fantasy “Areas of Darkness” (2011) and the youth dystopias “Divergent” (2014) and “Generation Voyager” ( 2020), it turned out to be more of a crime family drama. Yes, to put it mildly, about a rather unusual family – but something that doesn’t happen in the world. For Daisy Ridley, this is a rare opportunity to play not only a fighting heroine, capable of stopping a galloping horse, a coyote, or a psychopathic rapist, but also a woman overcome by conflicting feelings. And she copes. Although, perhaps, the task is simplified – or, on the contrary, complicated – by the fact that her heroine Helena is used to keeping her emotions inside, hiding them, like her true origin, from others.

Despite everything, Helena feels close to her father and cannot take away the good times they shared. The fact that he kidnapped her mother and tortured her, keeping her in captivity, she can understand with her mind, but not accept with her heart. And only a threat to her own family forces her to finally get rid of her childhood illusions. In this, oddly enough, it is her father’s lessons that come in handy for her, including the most important one – to gain true freedom you always have to sacrifice something important, but, despite the pain and internal resistance, it is worth it.