12 Movies Like Where The Crawdads Sing to Watch Next - Looper (2023)

Released by Sony Pictures

ThroughNeeraj Chand/Oct. 10, 2022 8:37 am EST

In many ways, modern Hollywood is defined by remakes and blockbuster franchises aimed at a demographic that likes their servings of cinema to come with lots of explosions and CGI effects. But occasionally, smaller films manage to make it at the box office, like 2022's "Where the Crawdads Sing."

Based on the bestseller by Delia Owensnovel of the same name, the film follows the story of Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman living alone in the North Carolina marshes in 1953. Initially preferring to run her own company, Kya eventually forms a relationship with two men once she reaches adulthood. But when one of those men is found dead, Kya suddenly finds herself in the public spotlight, struggling to refute allegations that she was the one who killed him.

While the critics didn't particularly like it, viewers fiercely disagreed, as evidenced by the gap between critics' and audiences' ratingsRotten tomatoes. It's no surprise, then, that this coming-of-age film raked in hefty profits at the box office (viaBox office mojo)

If you enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing and are looking for something similar to watch next, here are 12 movies from around the world that share similar themes of trauma, the transition to adulthood and love surrounded by mysteries and violence.

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The mid-2010s saw a number of promising developmentsNew horror filmmakers are shaping the genresuch as Ari Aster, Robert Eggers and Jordan Peele, as well as the rise of new stars in the genre. One of those stars is Anya-Taylor Joy, who has established herself as a prominent horror figure with films like The Witch (2015), Split (2016) and Marrowbone (2017).

Written and directed by Sergio G. Sánchez, Marrowbone stars Taylor-Joy as Allie, a young woman living in rural Maine who befriends a group of children who move into a house called the Marrowbone Residence Allie becomes closer to the eldest of the children, Jack (George MacKay). But as Allie and Jack work out their feelings for each other, dark secrets hiding in Marrowbone and the threat of the arrival of Jack's abusive father seem to derail their lives.

With a young cast of promising actors and an emotional narrative that runs throughout the film, "Marrowbone" relies on an atmosphere of psychological angst rather than jump scares to resonate with audiences. "Where the Crawdads Sing" allows the audience to root for the protagonist despite the accusations leveled at her, and "Marrowbone" acts in the same way. They can't help but hope that Allie, Jack and his siblings will find a way out of their troubles after years of abuse and isolation.

If you or someone you know may have been a victim of child abuse, please call or contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453). Live Chat Services.

DreamWorks-Bilder

Similar to "Where the Crawdads Sing", "The Girl on the Train" began.a best-selling novelwritten by Paula Hawkins, published in 2015. Hollywood jumped at the opportunity to make an adaptation of the novel, and in 2016, audiences got a film adaptation starring Emily Blunt, which made a splash at the box office (viaBox office mojo).

Rachel Watson (Blunt) is a lonely alcoholic struggling to come to terms with her failed marriage. Rachel has taken to driving trains aimlessly and watches from a safe distance as people pass her. During one such trip, Rachel meets Megan (Haley Bennett), who worked as a nanny for Rachel's ex-husband (Justin Theroux) and his new wife (Rebecca Ferguson). Hours later, Rachel wakes up covered in blood to discover that Megan has been reported missing. Now Rachel must work with the police to uncover the truth behind the disappearance in order to clear herself of any suspicion.

With a powerful lead from Emily Blunt as a stunned but internally wounded Rachel, The Girl on the Train functions as both a mystery thriller and a moving drama about the three female leads, played by Blunt, Ferguson and Bennett. "[T]he movie gives away the game quicker than the novel," noted Peter Travers in his review forRolling Stone. “But Emily Blunt digs so deep into the role of blackout drunk and maybe murderess that she shows upgirlto the level of a spellbinder."

If you or someone you know needs help with an addiction problem, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration website or contact the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

20th century fox

Filmmaker David Fincher is known for his unflinching exploration of the worst excesses of human nature in some of the highest-grossing thrillers of all time. When it was announced that Fincher would direct the theatrical adaptation of Gillian Flynn's best-selling 2012 psychological thriller.Ex girlfriend“, the fans were excited to see what the auteur filmmaker would do with the promising starting material.

Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is a writing teacher and struggling novelist caught in a troubled marriage to Amy (Rosamund Pike). On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick discovers that Amy has disappeared. A media storm gathers around Nick as evidence begins to mount that he was abusive to Amy, cheated on her with one of his students and killed his wife. But the truth turns out to be even more twisted once the audience sees the bigger picture from Amy's point of view. Like Kay in "Where the Crawdads Sing," Amy uses her innocent appearance to hide a distinct level of ruthlessness.

With Fincher's trademark gritty, stylish mix of smut and wit, Gone Girl hardly makes a noticeable misstep in unfolding the facts surrounding Amy's disappearance. Along with a talented supporting cast all bringing their A-game, Affleck and Pike give their best performances of their careers as a tortured couple with more skeletons in their closets than they know what to do with while they fight to make the world fronting a facade to present a perfect marital unity.

20th century fox

With his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars, John Green demonstrated his talent for telling tormented love stories. Green had previously trodden another dark path with his 2008 coming-of-age novel.paper cities,” which was adapted into a Hollywood feature film in 2015, starring Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne.

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen (Wolff) is a teenager who has had a long-standing crush on his neighbor Margo (Delevingne). Although they were friends from a young age, a traumatic incident separated Q and Margo well into their teens when Margo unexpectedly recruits Q for a late-night road trip. As the duo begin to reconnect, secrets from their childhood and an undisclosed part of Margo's personal life threaten to tear the budding relationship apart.

Much like "Where the Crawdads Sing," "Paper Towns" serves up some hard lessons and uncomfortable truths about growing up in a small town. The film works well thanks to the chemistry between the central cast, which makes the audience really care about the interpersonal drama between the high school students: "An engaging if familiar mix of teen rites of passage, the fun of it of a friendship and hanging out with a cool girl," noted Ian Freer in his review forEmpire Magazine. "Nevertheless, Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne make a duo worth seeing."

Classics from Sony Pictures

The "Beat Generation" was a post-war literary movement that became a worldwide phenomenon in the 1950s and subsequent decades (viaBritish). The movement was spearheaded by such well-known poets and writers as Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, and their group garnered more than a little bad press for their rejection of standard moral values. Kill Your Darlings offers a fictionalized version of some of the Beat Generation's most notorious moments.

In 1944, Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) is a freshman at Columbia University, where he meets the charismatic Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan). In college, Ginsberg and Carr met like-minded youngsters like William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), and their friendships became the foundation of what would one day come to be known as the Beat Generation. But the fraternity soon finds itself in danger as its young members ruthlessly experiment with drugs and new experiences.

Ginsberg's real-life secretary, Bob Rosenthal, criticized "Kill Your Darlings" for telling the true story of Carr and Ginsberg's college days (viaAllenginsberg.org). Yet despite some of these creative licenses, Kill Your Darlings also brings a rare energy and passion to the world of poets and writers. It portrays them as daring and very human rebels, rather than a collection of high-minded geniuses distant from the real world. Fans of Where the Crawdads Sing will appreciate the film's historical aspect as well as its mysterious components.

CJ entertainment

For many non-Korean fans, filmmaker Park Chan-Wook's 2003 "Oldboy" was their explosive first introduction to the fascinating world of Korean thriller films. What fewer people know is that "Oldboy" wasPart of a film trilogy by Chan-Wookdubbed the "Revenge Trilogy". The last part of the series appeared in 2005 with "Lady Vengeance".

Like Kya from Where the Crawdads Sing, Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) is a woman deeply wronged by society. Geum-ja has been in prison for more than ten years for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old. After proving to be a model prisoner, Geum-ja is finally released back into society, where she longs to exact revenge on the people who conspired to imprison her for a crime she didn't commit to put in jail. As Geum-ja seeks revenge, she discovers a more terrifying criminal world than she could have ever imagined.

Filmed with Park Chan-Wook's well-known blend of over-the-top violence and heartbreakingly emotional story beats, Lady Vengeance is a worthy follow-up to the previous two installments in the Vengeance trilogy. Lee Young-ae, starring Role, delivers a hauntingly powerful performance as a hardened anti-heroine trying to come to terms with the reality of a world where traditional morality is nothing more than a barely-remembered fever dream.

Netflix

"All things cease to appear' is a 2016 horror thriller film directed by Elizabeth Brundage and adapted into the 2021 psychological horror film 'Things Heard & Seen,' written and directed by the joint directing team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini.

In the 1980s, art historian Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) is offered a teaching position in upstate New York. She moves there with her husband and daughter and they rent a farmhouse that - unbeknownst to them - has a turbulent past. Soon, Catherine experiences a series of supernatural phenomena associated with the house. As her family descends deeper into a rabbit hole of violence and deceit, Catherine realizes that the real danger does not come from ghosts, but from the land of the living and those she trusts most.

While Things Heard & Seen drew some criticism for diluting the complexity of Elizabeth Brundage's narrative twists and turns in the original novel, the film was critically acclaimed for its leading actors and created an intriguing aura similar to an intangible threat surrounding the main character like "Where the Crawdads Sing."Johnny Oleksinski noted in his review forDie New York Postthat "[the film] has a spooky vibe and cooks appealingly slowly."

Netflix

Genre cinema is considered a rare commodity in Hollywood these days as film studios favor big-budget franchise IP. But streaming platforms have picked up the slack with a slew of new genre offerings from talented filmmakers. One such film is Netflix's Lost Girls, which is based on the real case of theLong Island serial killers.

On the offshore south coast of Long Island, Amy Ryan (Mari Gilbert) fights a lonely battle to uncover the truth about her daughter Shannan's (Sarah Wisser) disappearance. As Amy continues to bring law enforcement's attention to the case, a murder pattern emerges that all points to a serial killer targeting young sex workers.

Like Where the Crawdads Sing, Lost Girls has its roots in female-centric crime fiction. The film was adapted frombook of the same namedirected by Robert Kolker, and it does a reasonable job of sticking to the source material while fueled by engaging performances from its talented leading ladies. Several critics praised director Liz Garbus for narrating this story, with David Juwel giving particular creditGeier, "Garbus pulls off something extraordinary in a film that wants to leave us sad, angry and deeply unsatisfied."

Netflix

Daphne du Maurier's 1938 classic novel Rebecca has long been a source of inspiration for Hollywood. The book has already been adapted for film, stage and television, most notably in the 1940sOscar Winner for Best Picture"Rebecca" directed by master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. In 2020, filmmaker Ben Wheatley made another attempt to adapt the source material for modern audiences.

Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) is a wealthy widower grieving the loss of his first wife, Rebecca. In Monte Carlo, Maxim meets a beautiful young woman (Lily James) and the two marry after a hurricane hits. Soon after, the new Mrs. de Winter moves into Maxim's house. But the shadow of Rebecca's death hangs over the new couple as details from Maxim's past are revealed that threaten to destroy her life.

Inevitably, the new "Rebecca" is compared to Hitchcock's classic. Luckily, Wheatley's film has enough of its own identity to stand out despite the competitionControversy surrounding one of its main characters. Like Kya from "Where the Crawdads Sing," the protagonist of "Rebecca" is initially stalked by forces beyond her control as she must fight for her right to a life of love and safety. David Gonzalez noted in his review forReelTalk, "Ben Wheatley addresses the lingering spirit of Hitchcock and his Best Picture-winning film in one of the better remakes of the work of the Master of Suspense."

United artists

Perhaps counterintuitively, the horror film genre has always given female characters plenty of room for empowerment and autonomy, though it also frequently makes them victims and damsels in distress. One of the most famous horror icons is Carrie White, the teenage protagonist ofBestseller-Roman von Stephen King, later adapted into a 1976 film directed by Brian De Palma.

Sissy Spacek stars as the titular Carrie, a 16-year-old student with secret telekinetic powers who is frequently bullied by her peers while living with her religious fanatic mother. Things escalate when Carrie is nominated for prom queen in a plot to have her classmates humiliate her on stage. Things come to a head as Carrie prepares for the biggest night of her life, unaware that the prank is being staged against her. As with "Where the Crawdads Sing," the film makes a poignant statement about how far you can bully and push a woman before she fights back with great anger.

This dark and disturbing adaptation of "Carrie" is often cited as one of themthe best horror movies of all time, as well as one of the best movies to tackle high school angst and coming-of-age themes. Scenes from the film — notably Carrie standing on stage covered in blood — have wormed their way into pop culture for decades, while Sissy Spacek is best remembered for her title role in the film, for which she received oneOscar nomination for Best Actress.

Fox Searchlight-Bilder

Frances McDormand has long been hailed as a force of change in Hollywood, taking on a number of powerful and atypical roles in the later stages of her career. One such role can be found in the 2017 crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, in which McDormand plays a character with immense inner determination, similar to Kya from Where the Crawdads Sing in that McDormand plays a mother who tries to get justice for her dead daughter.

In the town of Ebbing, Missouri, Mildred Hayes (McDormand) is still wracked with grief over the rape and murder of her teenage daughter, Angela (Kathryn Newton). To make matters worse, local law enforcement seem uninterested in bringing Angela's killer to justice. Matters come to a head when Mildred rents three blank billboards and posts messages condemning the local police. The problem takes on new dimensions when Mildred goes up against not just the police, but the whole town.

With an impressive box office result (viaBox office mojo) and multiple award nominations and wins (viaIMDb), "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" proved to be a hit with both critics and audiences. CorrespondingMetro, the film inspired similar stunts in places like London and Florida, to which McDormand responded that she was "thrilled that activists around the world have been inspired by the set decorations of the three billboards in [the] film".

Viacom 18 Film

Outside of India, the Bollywood film industry is most commonly associated with song-and-dance musicals that focus on rousing romance. butBollywood films offer much more varietythan that, as exemplified by the 2012 thriller Kahaani, which creates a Hitchcockian mystery centered around a pregnant woman in a strange town.

Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) is a software engineer who comes to Kolkata, India from London in search of her missing husband. Despite being pregnant, Vidya is forced to conduct the search alone after realizing that the local police are indifferent to the issue. As Vidya delves deeper into the case, events begin to spiral out of control as both the police and mysterious government troops try to stop Vidya before she digs up too many skeletons in the town's closet.

A powerful lead from Balan elevates "Kahaani" above the trappings of a generic mystery thriller. Vidya is left to her own devices by the authorities, much like Kya in "Where the Crawdads Sing". They can't help but cheer on her journey to uncover the truth about her missing husband as she faces seemingly insurmountable odds. "Kahaani" also stands out for its depiction of a different side of Kolkata, which can be seen as Vidya and her allies dig deep into the city's seedy underbelly in search of answers.