Mark Reviews Movies: THE LOST DAUGHTER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 16, 2021

"Children are a crushing responsibility," says Leda (Olivia Colman) to a pregnant woman. This is probably the last thing this woman wants to hear, especially as put in such cold and pessimistic terms, but it's the only thing Leda believes the woman needs to know. She can't understand it now, but oh, she will. Will she ever.

That's the mood and attitude of Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut The Lost Daughter, which is frank, cynical, chilly about parenthood—particularly the specific pressures and expectations and, yes, crushing responsibilities that individuals and society place upon mothers. There is no greater joy than becoming a parent, so many say. The unspoken agreement of this adage is that a parent, especially a mother, had better display that sense of happiness, privilege, and contentment at every moment.

Leda doesn't. That has made her free enough to spend a week on a Greek island alone, relaxing when she isn't grading papers for the literature course she teaches at a prestigious university. It has also, though, made her lonely enough that everything about this vacation feels decidedly off.

Maybe her adult daughters should be with her. Maybe she should be more polite and open herself up to the assorted people who try to talk to her. Maybe she shouldn't be staring at a child's plaything with such envy or longing—or whatever it is that causes her to start a huge commotion and so much trouble over something as trivial as a doll.

The film, with a screenplay by Gyllenhaal based on Elena Ferrante's novel, is kind of a thriller—in that Leda is trying to keep a secret from specific and shady people in a small town, where gossip carries on the sea air—and sort of a mystery. That mystery is entirely about Leda—the harsh but clearly pained woman we see, the past we get to know, the older past of which she will only speak in vague statements and riddles.

We come to understand a lot about Leda, and all of it is presented with a tricky balance of implicit sympathy and almost karmic inevitability. The feelings that led her to this place, as well as the mounting sense of danger within it, are natural and not her fault. Still, look at the person, the mother, and the general mess Leda has become. Something in her formulation—of what her life could and should be—has gone terribly wrong, with the potential for tragedy.

The potential tragedy is established from the start, with a brief scene of Leda, stumbling toward the beach, with a red stain on her blouse, and collapsing to the sand. At the start of her stay, though, Leda is driving with her hand and later her head out the window, waving in the wind with the blissful fun of a child. Her apartment, introduced to her by local landlord Lyle (Ed Harris), is only a source of more joy. When Lyle departs, Leda lets out a girlish squeak. Sitting near the sea, Leda works and enjoys some ice cream, offered to her by Will (Paul Mescal), who works at the beach club.

The place isn't all quiet contentment, though, just as the underside of the fruit in Leda's apartment is rotting. The silence of the beach is interrupted by the arrival of an extended family, visiting the town from New York City. They're loud, rude, and bossy. When Leda stands up to them, Will says he admires her resistance. She shouldn't, though, do it again, he warns. They are bad people.

Those are the story's present-day scenes, which eventually lead Leda to become a bit of a local hero and a secret villain. She finds a little girl, who goes missing. The girl is the daughter of Nina (Dakota Johnson), whose own frustrations in being a mother start to mirror Leda's story.

The little girl's doll, though, goes missing, too. For whatever reason, Leda took it, hides it in her apartment, cradles it, and even buys a new outfit for it. It's like one she had as a child, she notes—one that her mother, who is never seen but whose existence is like a weight on Leda's mind, gave her.

The rest of the story offers a back-and-forth narrative. One half sees how contemporary Leda picks and prods at various people, while the tension of someone discovering her stolen valuable hangs in the air. The other watches a younger Leda (played by Jessie Buckley) feeling the constant pressure of being the "perfect" mother to her young daughters. There is a secret here of sorts, in how Leda ended up alone and in little contact with her daughters.

Gyllenhaal shows herself to be a clever and subtle storyteller. That's especially so in how the juxtaposition of the present and the past establishes certain expectations (The harried and hurried younger Leda, combined with Leda's clear admiration for her now-adult daughters, suggests one thing about the downfall of the relationships), only to gradually but definitively shatter them (The reality of current-day Leda's isolation has more to do with her own choices than anything else).

All of those details will remain a mystery here, but that does leave with us these central performances. In Colman, the film possesses a sturdy, riveting portrait of internalized angst and ever-expanding anxiety. The character is a bundle of nerves, suffering from dizzying headaches whenever things become too tough, and apparent contradictions—speaking skeptically of motherhood, but adoringly of her daughters now, and being so stand-offish, but making a most amusingly awkward attempt to flirt with Lyle after ignoring his approaches. Colman captures and exudes that nervous energy, while also suggesting the darker feelings of guilt and trauma at the source.

As for Buckley, she plays the younger Leda as a rawer, more intimate variation of the character. In those flashback scenes, showing the day-to-day struggles and burdens of everyday motherhood (Leda's husband, played by Jack Farthing, leaves all that to her), Buckley earns immediate sympathy, eventually forcing us to reckon with the character, her choices, and what drives them on a deeper level.

The Lost Daughter serves as a haunting study of this character, an "unnatural mother" by her own assessment. She might be, or she might simply be the result of so many presumably "natural" things levied against her.

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