Daisy Edgar-Jones's 2022 drama Where The Crawdads Sing is set to air on Channel 4 on Saturday evening, giving the film a new television audience more than two years after its original release. The adaptation, which follows Kya through childhood, loss and a murder investigation, has already drawn strong reactions from viewers who have praised it as beautiful, mesmerising and unforgettable.
Edgar-Jones plays Kya, the young girl left to fend for herself in the wilderness after being abandoned, with Taylor John Smith co-starring in the film produced by Reese Witherspoon. Based on Delia Owens's 2018 novel, the story begins with Kya's father walking away from the marshland dwelling and follows her as she sells mussels in town, learns to read from Tate and later comes under suspicion after a local boy from a nearby North Carolina town is found dead after falling from a tower.
That mystery gives the film its edge, even as audience reaction has leaned sharply toward sympathy for Kya. Viewers have called the movie the best of the year, said they never wanted it to end and described it as a cinematic masterpiece and a heart-touching love story. Others said it was gripping, insisted it should not be missed and even compared it favourably with Dirty Dancing, a response that has helped the film endure well beyond its 2022 release.
The Channel 4 screening arrives with that divide still intact: Kya is presented as a suspected killer, yet the public conversation around the film has been shaped just as much by tenderness as by doubt. When it reaches television on Saturday evening, it will not just replay the mystery at the centre of the story but reopen the question that has always followed it — whether viewers see Kya as guilty, or as a woman the world was too quick to judge.
