"Film Threat Reviews: The Marsh King’s Daughter Takes Center Stage"
In Neil Berger’s thriller The Marsh King’s Daughter, Daisy Ridley puts down her lightsaber and picks up a rifle. This film has a satisfying beginning, middle, and end, unlike the entire new Star Wars trilogy. Helena lives an unconventional life off the grid with her mother (Caren Pistorius) and father Jacob Holbrook (Ben Mendelsohn) in the wilderness. Being very close to her father, she learns how to hunt, how to survive by her own means, and the brutal indifference of nature. Through young Helena’s (Brooklyn Prince) eyes we can see her mother is not happy with this nomad life their family leads.
After her father goes hunting, Helena and her mother are visited by a man in an off-road vehicle. A man is lost and needs help getting back to the main road. Helena’s mother is both panicked and relieved and begs her man to help her. As fate would have it, and as movies tend to do, Jacob returns, sees them trying to escape, and tries to stop them with deadly force. After narrowly escaping to the nearest police station, Having narrowly escaped to the nearest police station, Helena’s entire reality is shattered as she is told the truth about her father. Jacob Holbrook had kidnapped her mother, raped her, and held her hostage in the woods for years. Jacob tracks them down at the precinct and attempts to coax Helena from the police but is ultimately apprehended. Before Jacob is arrested, he tells Helena, his “little shadow,” that he will find his way back to her.