Urgently need you to all understand that Where the Crawdad Sings is basically just Bob’s Burgers Season 1 Episode 5 “Hamburger Dinner Theater”. Ya know, the episode where Linda runs a dinner theater out of the restaurant and it’s a murder mystery and she plays a lonely mortician looking for love and part of her opening monologue involves her stating that the crowd will have to guess who the murderer is at the end but don’t worry! She’ll give you a hint! Linda is not the murderer. And then you get to the end of the show and everyone guesses the murderer is the red herring butler and that’s when Linda exclaims, “You’re all wrong! The murderer was me!” 

That’s literally what Where the Crawdad Sings is. 

Rolled my eyes a lot during the first hour and 20 minutes but then when there was about 40 minutes left, I got very, very intensely invested in who the actual murderer would wind up being. Sometimes astrological stereotypes are accurate, which is me saying that I am a gemini and I love drama. Then there was another moment near the end, with about 10 minutes left, where I got very mad that the film hadn’t ended. And then they do the big reveal as the last minute of the movie and I was left flabbergasted by the big reveal. Talk about emotional whiplash.

NOT a fan of virtually anything I have learned about Delia Owens, author of the source material for the film, and not necessarily a fan overall of what we got from this film. But I am a fan of seeing movies like this in theaters with my sister who loves drama just as much as me!