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The Lost Daughter review – Olivia Colman compels in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s eerie psychodrama

Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut turns Elena Ferrante’s dark tale about a seemingly idyllic Greek beach holiday into a menacing riddle of the sands

Maggie Gyllenhaal ’s feature debut as writer-director is an impressively atmospheric piece of work – filled with longing and dread, and heavy with the anticipation of buried secrets about to be revealed. Deftly adapted from Elena Ferrante ’s short source novel, it’s an enigmatic psychodrama that seems to teeter permanently on the brink of cataclysm. The fact that the plot itself stays largely within the confines of down-to-earth domestic reality merely amplifies the sense that we are wading into uncharted waters, and might at any moment be swept out to sea.

Olivia Colman is in her element as Leda, a middle-aged woman on a beach vacation in Greece that she insists on calling a “working holiday”. Leda is a professor of languages, a woman who understands the nuances of translating poetry, but who remains distinctly tight-lipped about her own personal situation. At first she seems content to lounge in the sun with her books in what looks like a little corner of paradise. But there are irritants in this garden of Eden, from the giant bugs that fly in through the window at night to the rowdy family from Queens who pitch their loungers next to hers and expect Leda to move along. When she refuses to comply, their stares resemble threats – as if some terrible line has been crossed.

Tensions thaw after Nina (Dakota Johnson) loses her young daughter on the beach and Leda promptly finds her – an act that seems to chime with an experience in Leda’s own past. Fragmentary flashbacks suggest a shared knowledge of this panic-inducing sense of loss, and hint that history is repeating itself. Once this lost daughter is retrieved, Nina and Leda form an uneasy bond, with the latter seeing guilty echoes of her younger self in a woman whose desires are evidently not constrained by motherhood and matrimony. Meanwhile, in a parallel past narrative that weaves in and out of the present-day revelations, Jessie Buckley plays the young Leda as a thrusting intellect whose career path is rudely interrupted by domestic life, and who seizes new opportunities regardless of the consequences.

Gyllenhaal has described the narrative of The Lost Daughter as being “very strange and painful, but also undeniably true”, as if her experience of being “a woman in the world was being spoken out loud for the first time”. A sense of transgression runs throughout this eerie film as it scratches away at the surface of its central character, revealing complex and contradictory layers of defiance, rage and grief under the apparently placid exterior. I detected more than a hint of French director François Ozon in Gyllenhaal’s beach-bound evocation of secrets and lies, as if the sea itself were about to strip away the sand to reveal jagged rocks. An image of a child’s doll with a worm crawling from its mouth skirts the boundaries of horror, while an air of brooding criminality lurks constantly at the edge of the frame, implying a genre-twisting turn for the worse.

The fact that Buckley and Colman seem a somewhat mismatched onscreen pair matters less than it might. Indeed, it’s a credit to both that they breathe such individual life into the figure of Leda, even if the loose ends of their respective stories never quite match up. As always, Colman manages to express deep wellsprings of emotion with few words and fewer gestures – her face telegraphing great swathes of anguish beneath polite smiles and annoyed glances. As for Buckley, she perfectly captures the imprisonment young Leda feels, with the revelation that she hates talking to her daughters on the phone pitched somewhere between self-determination and self-loathing.

The versatile cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose recent credits include Sarah Gavron’s Rocks and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always , achieves a perfect balance between distance and intimacy, bringing the audience close enough to these characters to convince us that we know them while also retaining an air of impenetrable mystery. A jazzy, dreamy score by Dickon Hinchliffe completes the picture, with the textures of a lost vinyl recording bridging the gap between the past, present and future.

In cinemas now and on Netflix from 31 December

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• The Lost Daughter

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The Pitiless Excellence of The Lost Daughter

No one says what they mean in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s astonishing directorial debut The Lost Daughter , but everything they do say is loaded with meaning. Conversations feel like stepping off the sand of one of the inviting beaches of the Greek island on which it takes place, and into waters concealing strong crosscurrents and a dangerous undertow. This is in part a function of the feelings of maternal ambivalence at the center of the film, which are so mundane and at the same time so taboo that when the characters recognize what they’ve been through in someone else, their instinct is to lash out rather than commiserate. But it’s also a testament to the way that the film unfolds in a parallel language of women, in a vocabulary built on close observations and almost imperceptible gestures learned over lifetimes of being expected to smooth over rumples in the social fabric.

An offer of a slice of birthday cake and an edged compliment (“We were saying before you couldn’t be more than 40”) from Callie (Dagmara Domińczyk), the matriarch of an unruly Queens family renting one of the island’s villas, doubles as a terrifying dominance display. A lightly delivered observation from Leda (Olivia Colman), the film’s protagonist, about her children (“The bits I find most beautiful about them are the bits that are alien to me … so I don’t have to take responsibility for that”) is a confession that goes unnoticed by the half-drunk young man who witnesses it. Leda, who’s also played by Jessie Buckley in flashbacks to around two decades earlier, has in the present day reached an age where the men around her seem to perceive her with a growing blurriness, as though unable to fully maintain focus on her. But the women gaze at her, and she looks back, with a clarity whose sharpness isn’t a comfort.

The Lost Daughter is adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante that takes place almost entirely inside Leda’s head and is by no means an obvious candidate to be translated onto the screen. But rather than try to wrestle with the interior nature of her source material, Gyllenhaal embraces it, trusting in her actors to transmit complex interior states the characters they’re playing wouldn’t necessarily be able to articulate out loud if asked. She has incredible collaborators in Colman and Buckley, actors who don’t especially resemble one another but who create a seamless life through the force of their melded performances. As the older Leda, a comparative literature professor at Harvard (you can tell from the way she says she’s “from Cambridge … near Boston”) who’s taking a solo working holiday that clearly sounded better in her head than in awkward practice, Colman is prickly and defensive, unable to cut loose and indulge the way she’d like to, and to decide, for instance, if caretaker Lyle (Ed Harris) is hitting on her, and if she wants him to be hitting on her.

As the younger Leda, Buckley fights to carve out time for her academic ambitions while also feeling crushed beneath the constant needs of her children, a sensation both exacerbated by but also separate from her attempts to have a professional life. In the memories that force their way to the surface — The Lost Daughter is very much the cinema of intrusive thoughts — Buckley conjures up a woman smothered by sticky-sweet child kisses and staggering away from clinging hugs, aware that her temper is too short but unable to help herself. What triggers these glimpses of the past is an encounter that is also the reason The Lost Daughter might be described as a thriller, despite the lowness of its stakes. Leda becomes fixated on the striking Nina (Dakota Johnson), who’s part of Callie’s clan, and who has a little girl who Leda helps find when the child briefly wanders off and gets lost.

At first, Leda’s interest in Nina seems born out of the way Nina reminds Leda of her own stretch as a young mother who seems, whether as part of an agreement with her husband or just gendered expectations, to shoulder childcare duties by herself. But it’s actually Nina’s struggles that pull Leda in, the way she sometimes chafes at her child’s proprietary ease with her mother’s body, or finds herself unable to tolerate that child’s runaway emotions. Leda sees in Nina another woman who’s still waiting for motherhood to come naturally, for nurturing to be effortless and for boundless well of patience to open up within her. Rather than offering kinship and affirming the normalcy of these experiences to the desperate Nina, though, Leda performs a capricious act of cruelty, stealing a beloved doll belonging to Nina’s daughter and guaranteeing a week of tears and tantrums.

It speaks to the pitiless excellence of The Lost Daughter that the film is marked by signals like that, ones that you understand even if the characters themselves wouldn’t be able to explain them. They’re the responses of characters who understand the unfairness of what they’ve been socialized to believe, but who can’t bring themselves to let go of those expectations in others, or to see themselves as anything other than unnatural. Leda teeters on a fulcrum in which self and motherhood have been placed on opposite sides, as though one can only come at the expense of the other. In the past, a trip to an academic conference and some praise from a perfectly smarmy professor played by Peter Sarsgaard spark her to life, until she’s glowing, torch-bright, at the joy of being seen and appreciated for her work. In the present, Leda tortures herself as the solo traveller, unable to take ownership of her own solitude and freedom, her books and work like a protective balustrade around her even when she’s sitting out by the shore, a prison of her own creation.

The Lost Daughter is an incredible first film, an incredible film in general, but its finest quality may be how very adult it is in its perspective on its characters, as though understanding that empathy can require precision more than it does gentleness.

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