Just how many women have become abducted kidnap bride-wives anyway? I didn’t know this was a thing and suddenly there’s a drama every year about one. The plot is fairly simple: some monstrous Republican-voting control freak targets a woman and steals her away to the woods where they play house forever. By the time there’s a child, the monster suddenly has relationship leverage making escape an impossibility.
And this is where we always pick up the story. Oh, ho hum, look, a wilderness family. Huh, why is mom always pissed off? It’s because we did not know the whole story. Yeah, I can see it now.
This particular abduction family exists in the swamps of Michigan’s upper peninsula where I can only imagine how freaking cold it is in winter. Hey, maybe the sparsely furnished rustic cabin has central heating. Who knows?
Helena Palletier (Brooklynn Prince young, Daisy Ridley grown) gets this tale told from her perspective. When she was young, their small nuclear family lived in the woods. Dad took her hunting every day. And on days when he didn’t, escape was in mom’s mind yet the wooded island they lived on prevented such. Actually, I’m not sure it’s an island, but why would you canoe to a place when you own a car?
Never mind.
As a child, Helena is loyal only to dad (Ben Mendelsohn), the soon to be named “Marsh King.” Jacob Holbrook is a hunter who has divided the world -and especially the wooded world he inhabits- into predator and prey. Yeah, that should have been a warning sign. Helena earns ink for displaying traits Jacob sees as positive. What’s remarkable is how normal this all seems:
“So the family lives in the woods …”
“So the daughter likes dad more than mom …”
“So they have a tattoo reward system …”
“So there’s a lot of hunting and killing …”
None of it seems too off -the-wall until an ATV pulls up, dad shoots the driver and mom (Caren Pistorius) goes bonkers insisting that “IT’S TIME TO RUN FROM DAD!!” We didn’t quite see that coming.
Oh. Dad’s a piece of crap rapist kidnapping douchebag. Huh. I just disliked him on principal without realizing his history.
The next scene is twenty years in the future. Helena is now Daisy Ridley with a home, husband, and child of 
her own working a dead-end data entry job, which seems completely out-of-place for a child we left in the woods. You’d only know she’s the same by the ink she’s trying to hide. This is clearly a witness relocation kind of thing. She wants nothing to do with good-ol’-dad.
And this is pretty much where the story loses me. We know exactly what’s going to happen. We know exactly how it’s going to turn out. And the film takes its sweet little time getting there, introducing a number of high improbabilities along the way. I think it would make more sense for dad to have served his time and been released on parole for good behavior. But then we’d never have an unbelievable escape scene, an unbelievable “fooling the investigators” scene, and most importantly, an unbelievable “how did you find her?” moment. Are people who spent two decades in lockdown suddenly master PIs? Are they whizzes at computerized surveillance and detection mechanisms? She changed her name. She didn’t leave a trail. She grew up. You can’t know her from sight or history and, yet, somehow, dad remains the master tracker even when the scent has been cold for twenty years.
Yeah, right.
The Marsh King’s Daughter is thrilling, yes, but also predictable and disheartening. This feels much more like the story the writer wanted to tell rather than one which flows naturally. Of course, you want the villain to be omniscient and a constant threat, but it just doesn’t match the narrative. He lived in the woods for over a decade, but he’s got super internet and library research skills? That doesn’t jive; nor do I believe for a second he would harm his daughter. He LOVES his daughter; it’s his one redeeming grace.
This film doesn’t work.
There once was a girl named Helen
Who lived way beyond city yellin’
She got a big frown
When stealing to town
To discover daddy’s a known felon
Rated R, 109 Minutes
Director: Neil Burger
Writer: Elle Smith, Mark L. Smith, Karen Dionne
Genre: Daddy’s home!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Abductees
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Monsters in human form
