In The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s meticulous directorial debut featuring Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson, Gyllenhaal works with a familiar story: an older woman recognizes herself in a younger woman, ruminates on her own troubled past, and, presumably, comes to a profound realization about herself. However, the film, based on a novel by Elena Ferrante, transcends this trope in its rapid departure from normalcy and its transition into psychological intrigue.
Meanwhile, its core tensions lie in the clash between past and present, guilt and acceptance. How do parents, especially mothers, expunge their guilt? How do they cope with past actions that seem heinous to a society that is deeply judgemental of women? While The Lost Daughter leaves viewers with no tidy answers, it’s a beautiful chronicle of both maternal loneliness and pain, deftly emphasized by Gyllenhaal through slow, revelatory pacing and foreboding music.
Leda (Olivia Colman), a successful professor, is visiting Greece for a much-needed vacation, but she finds herself chafing against the noisy, and possibly criminal, family that owns the property where she is staying –– of whom Nina (Dakota Johnson), a struggling young mother, is a member. Witnessing the woman’s distress –– exacerbated when Nina’s daughter loses a favorite doll –– causes Leda to ruminate on her own ambivalence about motherhood and her eventual decision to leave her now-grown daughters, albeit temporarily. Her impulsive theft of the child’s doll has drastic implications for the characters and, psychologically speaking, is bound up in Leda’s earlier parental failures. Arguably, she’s clinging to her own youth as well as her daughters’, but her disturbance runs much deeper and is instead rooted in an ill-informed escapism that is destined to fail, as she ultimately cannot avoid her guilt.
Coleman captures her character’s loneliness and defiance in her prickly reactions to both the hotel manager Lyle (Ed Harris), who’s nursing his own parental wounds, and to Nina’s acid-tongued sister-in-law Callie (a divine Dagmara Domińczyk). While Leda’s surface-level kindness to Nina could easily come across as a cheap way to expunge her lasting sense of guilt, her generosity is too barbed to be a truly authentic endeavor, so the plot never lapses into cliché. Instead, the dichotomy between her apparent friendliness to Nina and her theft of the doll creates a sustained tension that feels increasingly perilous as the film unfolds. Ultimately, Leda’s disguised hostility to Nina, and her open disdain for the younger woman’s truly frightening family, becomes almost masochistic. It’s as if, in hurting Nina, she’s proving to herself how awful she can really be.
Yet the intersplicing of scenes from the past (wherein Leda is played by an excellent Jessie Buckley), as well as her genuine and failed efforts towards peace and quiet as she’s surrounded by impossibly rude vacation goers, elicits viewers’ sympathy. Leda isn’t purely tragic or broken, but neither is she entirely “okay.” It’s this instability of character that Coleman, wearing a perpetual frown and monitoring the actions of others as much as her own, picks up on.
Leda’s actions are an elaborate form of self-punishment that some viewers might even believe is her just reward. However, Gyllenhaal’s steely-eyed cinematic glimpse into the demands of motherhood would spark the sympathy of even the most skeptical moviegoer. Parents are never free, and it’s freedom that Leda has striven for –– at tremendous cost to herself and others. The Lost Daughter is an unflinching look at the by-products of maternal guilt and the terror and isolation of motherhood.
