Karen Dionne’s Crimson Scribe-award winning, best-selling novel “The Marsh King’s Daughter” earns a sturdy, suspenseful big screen treatment by the director of “The Illusionist” and “The Upside.”

Neil Burger benefits from having a compelling lead — Daisy Ridley — and one of the Best Villains of Our Time, Ben Mendelsohn, as her antagonist teacher/father, a back-to-the-woods murderer and kidnapper.

If the story feels cinematically familiar, perhaps you’re thinking of “Where the Crawdads Sing” when you’re also remembering “Leave No Trace.” A child, brought up Davey Crockett style, “raised in the woods so’s (she) knew every tree,” finds herself calling on that knowledge when tested by a life-and-death situation that also reveals much about the woodsman who raised her.

We meet Helena when she’s ten, growing up off the grid in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helena, played by Brooklynn Prince (“The Florida Project”) at this age, is an impressionable Daddy’s girl who skips homeschooling and housework with mom (Caren Pistorious) for any chance to wander the woods with Dad.

Father Jacob is a gentle but unsentimental teacher and taskmaster.

“If you were afraid, running for your life, where would you go?” “Where no one could see me.”

Giving her the shot at a deer they’ve been stalking makes her ask, “What if I miss?” “Then we go hungry tonight.”

A hungry mother wolf eyes her as the meal she might very well be and earns Father’s sternest lesson.

“You must always protect your family.”

These often wordless reveries in the woods come with a lesson, and often with a test. Pass or fail, “Little Shadow” earns a Native style tattoo about the experience from her dad.

And then the day comes when she might start to figure things out, why her mother is so unhappy and distressed, why her father gets rough with her. A stranger sees them and that triggers a getaway. Mom has to blurt out “I was kidnapped” and incapicate the confused and furious child to escape the marksman/monster who has held them both captive.

Years pass, and Helena (Ridley) has a little girl of her own, a college professor husband (Garrett Hedlund), a Jeep XJ, cinematically appropriate transportation for a U.P. college professor’s family and an anonymous life in the same corner of the world where she grew up.

Even her husband doesn’t realize she’s the notorious “Marsh King’s Daughter.” And then the Marsh King busts out of prison.

Burger and screenwriters Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith abandon some of Dionne’s novelistic devices, giving “Him” and “The Daughter” names straight away, etc.

The story’s contortions to avoid being predictable often come to naught in the film, as there’s only path this tale can take and still deliver something like “The Hollywood Version.” But Burger & Co. maintain suspense and make us guess at how far they’ll take things, as a coyote who chews off his own leg is laid out as allegorical foreshadowing and the ultimate endorsement of the father’s “There’s nothing more pure than the instinct to survive” lesson.

Ridley is properly alarmed, brave and stoic as Helena. The accent may not be “U.P.” if there is such a thing. But she’s credibly American and properly rawboned, woodlore competent and understandably secretive. Gil Birmingham stands out as the sheriff who had a hand in “rescuing” Helena and her mother, and became a big part of her life. Hedlund makes do with a largely thankless role, a husband with no “agency” in his wife’s severest trial.

But this is Mendelsohn’s movie. Whenever he goes a stretch without playing a big screen heavy, it just underscores how good he is at it when he returns to the Dark Side. Here, his father-figure is a man of mystery. We don’t know how he came to be the woodlands incel who kidnapped a woman and raised a daughter to be just like him.

Mendelsohn makes us believe in this roughhewn Jacob every second he’s on the screen. We don’t need to know his back story. He just “is.” Never over-the-top, always cold-blooded and rational, this is a role all but novelized with Mendelsohn in mind.

The predictability of much of what we see unfold here isn’t an asset. “Marsh King’s Daughter” can feel perfunctory, lacking the interior life that a novel gives characters. But the settings, the striking cinematography, sharp, suspense-heightening editing of the action beats and the stars lead this Marsh King’s Daughter out of the swamp.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Ben Mendelsohn, Gil Birmingham, Brooklynn Prince, Caren Pistorious and Garrett Hedlund.

Credits: Directed by Neil Burger, scripted by Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith, based on the novel by Karen Dionne. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:48