Disneyfied chitlins with no grits, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING is a one note chorus of disavowing the meat of a fully fleshed drama by turning it into a syrupy confection. Even as a souffle, it doesn’t rise.

A tale of child abuse, abandonment, rape and murder should be a recipe for a film you can really get your teeth into but with WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING there’s just not enough chomp in the swamp.

Daisy Edgar Jones as the Marsh Girl, illiterate hermit shunned and reviled by the North Carolina community is just too clean, neat and tidy. Believability goes out the window, pursued by Santy Clause and the Tooth Fairy.

Her love interest, Taylor John Swift looks like a clone of Tab Hunter from Central Casting.

The ever watchable David Strathairn makes an appearance as an Atticus Finch facsimile, occupying the best scenes in the whole picturesque paltry.

Told in flashback with courtroom scenes that ring true circa the Deep South 1969, the picture is peppered with redundant and superfluous narration, playing out like a book adaptation for dummies.

All the more dismaying this dismal film was written by Lucy Alibar who penned Beasts of the Southern Wild, a bona fide masterpiece from a few years ago. Where that film was magical, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SINGS is hokum, flim flam, insouciance, with as much verisimilitude as a centipede in a tutu.

Willows weep and so did I at the sanitised insubstantial swamp wash.

Directed by Olivia Newman with all the finesse of a gator grabbing your granny, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING is based on the book by Delia Owens. I have a feeling it reads better than it plays.