Genre: Thriller/Drama
Premise: A little girl living in the wilderness with her parents has her life turned upside-down when a mysterious man shows up on something she’s never seen before – a snowmobile.
About: An interesting project today, guys. First off, we have a script by Mark L. Smith (and his wife!). Smith, the writer of Leo DiCaprio’s The Revenant, is one of the most coveted writers in town. The Smiths are adapting a novel that’s said to be the next “Room,” which, for those of you who remember, was my favorite movie of 2015. Also, this is one of the rare novels on Amazon that has over 1000 reviews and a 4 and 1/2 star rating or higher. So it’s supposed to be really good.
Writer: Elle Smith and Mark L Smith (based on the novel by Karen Dionne)
Details: 106 pages
There are so many common story scenarios that it’s easy to get discouraged. Why try to write another version of an idea when it’s been done so many times already? Luckily, there’s an answer to that. You simply look for a new angle.
Take a young girl being kidnapped. That’s as old a scenario as it gets. So how can you approach that angle differently? Well, you can approach it via a detective looking for the young girl. You can turn the missing girl into a cold case, so the detective is looking for her 30 years after she went missing. You can tell the story from the missing girl’s perspective. You can tell the story from the kidnapper’s perspective.
In the book, “Room,” (not the movie), a little boy tells the story about living in this room for his whole life with his mother, who, it turns out, was kidnapped by the man who’s now holding her captive here. He, the boy, happens to be the offspring of his mother and that man. That’s about as unique an angle as you can come up with for a kidnapping story.
Which brings to The Marsh King’s Daughter, a story that takes the same initial angle as Room but switches a few key variables. 12 year old Helena Holbrook lives in the middle of Northern Michigan in a settler’s cabin with her father, Jacob, and her mother. We’re initially led to believe that this is the 1800s. But then, after hunting with her father, Helena stumbles across a PEOPLE MAGAZINE with Princess Di on the cover. It turns out we’re a little closer to modern day than we thought.
We immediately get the sense that Helena’s mom isn’t the happiest person. While Jacob can’t wait to go out with his daughter and teach her about survival every day, Helena’s mom just stands around and scowls a lot. When Jacob heads out for a two day trip to get supplies, a lost man on a snowmobile zooms up to the house. Both Helena and her mom stare at it in shock. Helena has never seen a snowmobile in her life. She’s never seen any type of vehicle. Then, inexplicably, the mom charges the man and starts screaming, “Hurry! Get us out of here before he comes back!”
What we’re about to learn is that Jacob kidnapped the mom when she was 13, then brought her up here and had a child – Helena. This man is a kidnapping rapist. Which means Helena’s entire life has been a lie. No time to worry about that though as a hole appears in the snowmobiler’s head. Yup, he’s dead. The dad is sniping at them at getting closer. Helena’s mom grabs her and zooms off on the snowmobile. Helena wakes up in a modern day police precinct a few hours later. There she’s told the truth about her life, a truth she can’t accept.
That’s the end of the first act and we cut to modern day, where Helena is now married to a man named Stephen. They have a little girl of their own, Marigold, and live in a beautiful Ann Arbor, Michigan house. But their marriage is on the rocks due to the fact that Helena is a psychological mess, unable to trust anyone or anything. Compounding this daily trauma, she’s kept the truth of her former life a secret from her family.
Then the unthinkable happens. Jacob escapes from prison. It doesn’t take long for the FBI and media to descend upon Helena, as they suspect she’ll be the first one he contacts. Stephen feels like he’s been hit with an atom bomb as he realizes everything he thought he knew about his wife is a lie. All of a sudden, the family must prepare for the possibility that Jacob will come for them.
Helena is going insane. Even after they find a burned body in the woods they say is, 100%, Jacob’s dead body, she knows he’s still out there. So she heads to a secret waterfall that they used to talk about all the time, a place he said she could always find him. And he didn’t lie. She shows up and there he is. The question is, what does he want from her? Or, more appropriately, what does he plan to do to her?
Like I said, The Marsh King’s daughter takes a different angle from what we traditionally see in kidnapping movies. The kidnapping has already taken place well before the story started. We get a great early twist when the snowmobile man shows up and is subsequently killed. Talk about grabbing the reader. As a result, the first act is nearly perfect.
But then the story decides it’s going to be a PTSD movie based on how kidnapping affects the victim after they’ve grown up. I like that the writers approach yet another kidnapping movie from a fresh angle. But let’s get real here. Living a safe life with years of distance between you and your kidnapping is never going to be as intense as being inside the kidnapping story as it’s happening.
I think the writers sensed this and were looking for as many ways as possible to keep that setup interesting. First we get the prison escape. Which does add a more exciting element than had their not been an escape. Then we move into Michael Myers territory where Helena starts to think she sees Jacob around town.
The problem with that is that it was explicitly set up that Jacob loved Helena more than anything. He would never hurt her. So when I see Michael Myers in the downtown crowd of a Halloween party, I know my heroine is going to be in a life or death struggle within the next few scenes, seeing Jacob in a crowd means… what? He’s going to come over and say hi? They’re trying to present his presence as dangerous when it isn’t.
What this all means is that The Marsh King’s Daughter is more of a drama than a thriller. An if you’re looking at it through that lens, it does a solid job. I liked exploring the psychological trauma something like this would do to a person. I watched that Amanda Knox documentary on Netflix and there is nothing more haunting than that woman’s eyes. What she went through in Italy when she was accused of murder and subsequently went to prison – that still informs every single decision she makes during the day. And we get the sense that Helena is a similar position. How can she trust anyone when the one person she was supposed to able to trust turned out to be a monster?
But, in the end, this script struggles with structural problems. The best stuff, by far, occurs in the first quarter of the story. That cannot be the case. A script must get better as it goes on. It can never be NOT AS good as what preceded it. This happens whenever you create a narrative that has characters waiting for the plot to give them permission to act. This whole movie is built around Helena waiting for the plot to tell her what to do. Wait once the dad escapes prison. Wait to see if the DNA on the burned body matches her dad. Wait for the media and FBI to come to her. 75% of Helena’s journey is waiting. Like I always say, it’s not impossible to make “waiting around narratives” work. But it sure as heck isn’t easy.
Despite that, the script has a great first act and a good last act. And it’s written well. For those reasons, I think it’s worth reading.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Three variables you can use to find new angles on old ideas are PERSPECTIVE, TIME, and GENRE. Perspective refers to which character’s point of view you follow the story from. I just talked bout this in a recent review. The writer wrote a story about a teenage boy losing his virginity from the point of view of the condom. Time refers to when you cover the event. Today’s review was about the effects of a kidnapping 20 years later. Also, “time” is a shifting variable. Nobody says you can only cover one time period. Marsh King covers two. The kidnapping when it was going on and the kidnapping 20 years later. Finally, genre allows you to instantly change an idea. Marsh King is a different film if we make the dad a vampire. It’s also a different film if we make Helena a stand-up comedian who uses her unique kidnapping past to frame her stand-up routine (“So you guys thought you had a bad childhood cause Johnny didn’t ask you to prom? Check this out.”)… The important thing here is to never give us the most generic version of the idea. That’s usually the one that nobody’s going to care about. Playing with the variables is the key to making your idea stand out.
