Film Review: The Marsh King's Daughter

Nothing will quite capture the feeling of first watching, The Marsh King's Daughter drunk in a dark living room, my friend passed out on her couch beside me, a stripper pole partially obscuring my view. More than a little tipsy and annoyed that my friend had roped me into watching this psychological thriller I'd never heard of before falling asleep on me ten minutes in, I got my snacks and hunkered down. Within the first few minutes of The Marsh King's Daughter though, the snacks were forgotten and I was hooked. Later on, I was grateful my friend was sleeping so I could process all of the messy emotions the film brought out in me in drunken semi-privacy.

That was three years ago and I haven’t been able to get The Marsh King’s Daughter out of my head since. I watched it again this weekend to see if it was as good as I remembered and sure enough, it was.

The Marsh King’s Daughter was released in November of 2023, written by Elle Smith based off the novel by Karen Dionne. This psychological thriller was directed by Neil Burger, responsible for titles such as, Limitless (2011) and Divergent (2014), with screenwriters such as Mark L. Smith of The Revenant (2015) also collaborating on The Marsh King’s Daughter. The result? A carefully crafted and thoughtfully detailed hour and forty-eight minutes of pure, poetic tension filled with stunning cinematography.

The Marsh King’s Daughter explores themes of generational trauma, survival, family, and what it means to protect your own.

The beginning of The Marsh King’s Daughter introduces us to a family of three living deep in the marshy wilderness. We meet young Helena, her mother, Beth, and her father, Jacob (‘The Marsh King,’ played by Ben Mendelsohn).

Helena and her father are evidently very close as he teaches her how to track, hunt, and survive in the wilderness with consequences as harsh and unforgiving as nature itself.

Each time Helena either succeeds or fails in the tasks her father gives her, she is branded by him with a crude stick-and-poke tattoo. Despite this, Helena, not knowing any better, thinks the world of her father while holding disdain for her mother who Jacob repeatedly tells her, ‘is a liar.’

Their life as they know it all comes to an abrupt end when Jacob goes off to hunt on his own one afternoon, leaving Helena and Beth alone at the cabin for a stranger on an ATV to stumble across them. The stranger doesn’t know anything about Jacob or his family, only that he himself has gotten lost in the wilderness.

When this stranger asks Beth for directions out of the marsh, she panics and begs him to take her and Helena away from Jacob’s cabin in the woods, right before Jacob returns, shoots, and kills him. From there begins a struggle between Beth, Helena, and Jacob, as Beth attempts to pull Helena onto the stranger’s ATV and escape. Not knowing how to calm Helena down enough to get her on the ATV, Beth hits her daughter over the head with a rock, knocking her out.

When Helena comes to, she is in an entirely new world from the one she has known her whole life. She wakes up in a police station, for the first time seeing electricity such as lights, a clock, and a coffee-maker. Helena also, (other than the stranger) sees people other than her own family for the first time.

Police officers try to explain that Jacob had kidnapped Beth twelve years earlier and that 10-year-old Helena and her mother are now free. The implications of this timeline are clear to the audience, but not to young Helena who still thinks her father is a hero and that her mother is lying.

Panicking, Helena tries to escape the police station to reunite with her father who is hiding just outside. When police cars surround the two and capture Jacob, he promises Helena that he will come back for her one day.

Twenty or so years later, we meet an adult Helena (Daisy Ridley) who now understands the full weight of what was done to her and her mother, working as an accountant at a university. Helena has her own family now and her own young daughter, although she has lied to her husband about who she is, claiming her parents are dead, in an attempt to live a ‘normal’ life. This lie comes undone when, while being transferred to another prison, Jacob escapes and the police come to Helena’s home to ask questions about whether she has had any communication with her father.

From there, we watch as Jacob tries to keep his promise by ‘coming back’ for Helena, essentially stalking and hunting her and her new family, threatening to kidnap her and her daughter, Marigold.

And the only person who can outsmart him? The daughter he raised and taught how to protect a family, himself.

While watching The Marsh King’s Daughter, I couldn’t help but reflect on the sometimes complicated nature of relationships between fathers and daughters, and how sometimes the man you admire most in childhood is also the one to leave the deepest wounds. This reality can be dizzying to unpack in adulthood, leaving one to re-examine their childhood and parse through their own identity as they try to decide what traits from their upbringing to carry with them, which to leave behind, and which they cannot escape, no matter how much they may want to.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is a suspenseful, emotional, and deeply layered movie that kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Every dramatic choice is also a poetic one, every detail intertwining with the heart of the story itself, and when the ending comes, it is tense, beautiful, and satisfying.

Although this movie already runs close to 2 hours in length, I only wish it was longer.

Have you watched The Marsh King’s Daughter? What did you think?

My Rating: 4 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️