The Lost Daughter: Olivia Colman Excels in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Examination of Motherhood and Memory

By Linda Barnard

Rating: A

Olivia Colman’s Leda impulsively does something shockingly mean-spirited to a toddler in psychological drama The Lost Daughter.

It’s among several twisting, unsettling moments that mark Maggie Gyllenhaal’s skilled first outing as director. Gyllenhaal also wrote the screenplay, adapted from Italian author Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel of the same name.

Leda is a midlife academic on a working holiday in Greece. There’s something a bit off about her. There’s an occasional nervousness and melancholy. Leda says and does things that swing from quirky to inappropriate. She’s often wobbly on her feet, like the world is pitching beneath her.

There’s a touch of the macabre on this beautiful and idyllic island. A dead bug leaves a smear like blood on a pillow. The tempting fruit in a bowl in Leda’s room has rotten undersides. A pinecone falls from a tree, landing like a blow on a tender shoulder. Gyllenhaal layers these carefully.

Adding further unpredictability, Leda can’t seem to read people or situations, especially with the ex-pat caretaker Lyle (Ed Harris) at her hotel and an earnest beach attendant with an agenda (Paul Mescal).

Leda planned for relaxing days working from her sunchair on the empty beach, arriving at the hotel with a relaxed smile and luggage filled with books. That’s upended with the arrival of members of an extended, rowdy Greek-American family who have rented a large villa up the hill from her hotel.

When asked to give up her chair and move down the beach to make room for the newcomers to sit together, Leda refuses. With an easy smile, she tells Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), the pregnant matriarch standing over her, that she’s fine where she is.

Callie can’t understand Leda’s refusal to shift a few feet. Icy stares and muttered comebacks don’t stop her from coming to the beach the next day, mostly to continue to observe Callie’s sister-in-law Nina (Dakota Johnson), an overwhelmed young mother whose frustration is like a mirror on Leda’s life.

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Leda is fascinated by her. She watches her as she lounges in a tiny bikini, deals with or ignores her daughter’s frantic demands and argues with her husband. I know you, Leda’s gaze seems to say. Does she see herself in Nina, reminded of her relationship with her daughters and decisions she made as a young mother?

Beachfront battle lines between Leda and the family ease when Nina’s child, now bored, takes her doll and wanders off.

Panicked, Nina runs down the beach calling out for help. Does Leda join the search to impress Nina? She finds the child, scoops her into her arms, and brings her back in triumph to Nina, but she’s kept and hidden the girl’s beloved doll. Leda later sees the child is inconsolable. How could a mother bear to watch a child’s heartbroken reaction to losing her doll?

At first, it’s not clear Jessie Buckley (brilliant here) is playing the young Leda in flashback scenes. She’s restless, ambitious, and unsure about motherhood and her marriage. She loves her young daughters but finds them draining. She’s suffocating. A weekend away at a conference feels like an escape, especially when a fellow scholar (Peter Sarsgaard) publicly praises Leda’s brilliance.

Whether understanding the motivation for keeping a stolen doll, or larger questions about motherhood and why women are expected to just naturally embrace self-sacrifice, Gyllenhaal offers no easy answers.

With brilliant work by Colman, The Lost Daughter is a haunting work about choices, motherhood, and memory.

The Lost Daughter. Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Starring Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Dagmara Dominczyk, Peter Sarsgaard and Ed Harris. Now in theatres now and streaming on Netflix beginning December 31.