Young Helena (Brooklynn Prince) roams through the moor with her father Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn). She is an experienced hunter. He taught her how to track and how to handle a knife. For Helena, he’s the king of the marshes. But when a stranger reaches the remote cabin, the mother (Caren Pistorius) takes his ATV and escapes from the forest with her surprised daughter.

The distraught girl finds out that her father held her captive in his cabin for more than 10 years. Two decades later, Helena (Daisy Ridley) lives with her husband and daughter far away from the wilderness. When her father escapes prison, the past, which Helena has been trying to repress for all these years, infiltrates her new life and awakens dormant instincts within her. Director Neil Burger takes a lot of time before the “hunter awakens“ to show the seeming idyll in the forest that was suddenly destroyed for the girl and this is how the film creates an understanding for the relationship between the daughter to her father. STAR WARS hero Daisy Ridley (THE FORCE AWAKENS) has the perfect prerequisites to fulfull the physical as well as emotional demands of the role. The adaptation of the novel by Karen Dionne by screenwriters Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith (THE REVENANT) is successful, even though some plot elements become obvious and we don’t gain much insight into Helena’s interior. Thriller fans will be rather disappointed because the conventional showdown doesn’t offer anything new – the strengths of THE MARSH KING’S DAUGHTER is in the ambivalent relationship between the father and daughter and the question of how far they would go in order to protect their own family.

Lars Tuncay

Translation: Elinor Lewy