The intrigue begins in a remote river valley in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, some 20 years ago: Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn) is teaching his tattooed 10-year old daughter Helena (Brooklynn Prince) to hunt. When she misses her target, she gets a tattoo; when she makes her first kill, she gets a tattoo. The father-daughter relationship is intense but cold. When Helena refuses to shoot a hungry wolf lurking outside the family’s cabin, she gets a lecture on the dark side of nature: “A wolf holds no pity,” Jacob tells her. “Just the desire to live another day.” So far, it plays like a hard-boiled variation on “Little House on the Prairie.”
This tenuous idyll is broken when the outside world intrudes. It turns out that Jacob, known as the Marsh King in the local press for his off-the-grid lifestyle, kidnapped Helena’s mother 10 years ago, held her captive in the woods and impregnated her.
After Jacob is apprehended for this crime in dramatic fashion — a poster of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” suggests that the arrest takes place around 2001 — the film jumps forward to the present, as we see the now-grown Helena, played by Daisy Ridley, with an office job, a husband (Garrett Hedlund) and a young daughter of her own (Joey Carson). She hides most of her tattoos, along with her past.
All is apparently fine until Jacob — in a Michael Myers-like spree of violence — escapes from jail. Will he seek out his once-feral daughter?
The presence of Ridley and Mendelson, both veterans of the Star Wars franchise but on opposite side of the battle between good and evil, suggests a more modest, earthbound version of that dynamic. And as evil as Jacob may be, when a series of establishing shots leads the viewer from picturesque bird’s-eye views of wild marshes to drone shots of suburban development, you might start to think: Maybe this Marsh King guy has a point about living in the woods.
But the film’s execution isn’t entirely convincing. It’s not the actors’ fault: Mendelson, who has proved himself to be a terrific, versatile performer in everything from intergalactic blockbusters to the quiet indie film “Mississippi Grind,” is menacing as the grizzled prison escapee, less so as the weird, Unabomber-esque dad.
In the role of a woman with a secret past, Ridley is effective. The character of Helena is able to navigate the civilized world, but she really comes to life when her paranoid instinct for preservation kicks in. Jacob’s escape makes her want to protect her new family, but it’s also as if it awakens some sort of call of the wild in her. When she predictably returns to the marsh of her youth, she still has the steely nerve and know-how to track prey (and predators) — wisdom instilled in her by her criminal father.
The lengthy game of cat and mouse that ensues, resolving the plot, brings us back to the hunt with a satisfying sense of closure. But for too much of “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” the tale is too tame, its savagery held too much in check to truly hold the audience in its thrall.
R. At area theaters. Contains graphic violence against people and animals. 108 minutes.