Directed by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris
Rated R, 121 minutes
Olivia Colman is the rare actress capable of finding humor in even the most serious roles. The British actress, who got her start in irreverent TV comedies, has built her career on characters who are always visibly amused by the peculiarities of their lives and often resigned to their own idiosyncrasies. Her breakout role as Queen Anne in 2018’s “The Favourite,” for which she won an Oscar, made excellent use of this comedic instinct of hers. Her performance in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new drama “The Lost Daughter” similarly finds Colman embracing the oddities of a character beset by troubles both large and small.
Here she plays Leda Caruso, a professor vacationing on a secluded Greek isle, where at every turn her peace and quiet are interrupted—by loud tourists, by rain, by lighthouses that disrupt her sleep, by enormous insects that fly through her open window. When she meets a younger woman, Nina (Dakota Johnson, “Fifty Shades of Grey”), the sight of Nina’s young daughter provides the greatest disruption of all, triggering a series of flashbacks to Leda’s own experiences as a young mother.
“The Lost Daughter” centers on juxtapositions and parallels between Leda and Nina, as well as between Leda’s current and former selves. In flashbacks, the younger Leda (Jessie Buckley, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”) is advancing in a niche academic circle while struggling to raise two needy daughters. We eventually come to understand that something terrible has happened, something that has traumatized Leda so thoroughly that now, 20 years later, she suffers from chronic dizzy spells. In Colman’s hands, Leda’s present-day anxieties are almost humorous, though in a trying sense, her situation so stressful she can’t help but laugh.
Much of the film’s tension comes from the slow reveal of what happened in Leda’s past life, and although we don’t learn that big secret until late in the film, its impact is felt throughout. In an early present-day scene, she inexplicably steals Nina’s daughter’s doll and stashes it in a cabinet; the girl’s ensuing tantrums keep everyone on edge for days. Motherhood, for Leda (and subsequently for Nina), is a series of quiet dissociations, a constant buildup of tension with no release. “I felt like I’d been trying not to explode,” she says of her early years of motherhood; to Nina’s pregnant sister, she says, almost cheerfully, “Children are a crushing responsibility,” and walks away.
The ebb and flow of its story makes “The Lost Daughter” uniquely subversive, its unusual structure complementing Leda’s unusual instincts. (“I’m an unnatural mother,” she confesses outright.) Simple moments—a dinner shared between Leda and the local handyman, Lyle (Ed Harris, “The Truman Show”); a trip to the local theater ruined by rowdy teenagers; an encounter with Nina’s husband in a parking lot while looking for her rental car—take on the weight of her crisis of conscience, possessing all the tension of an act of violence without any blood actually being spilled. Characters shrink away from one another and then approach with sudden intensity, always saying exactly the wrong thing, always too emotionally distant to find peace with one another.
It’s an impressive and assured effort from writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, here making her debut behind the camera. Adapting the script from Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, Gyllenhaal fills the film with self-contradictory dialogue and tight closeups, affording her characters no room to hide. Her direction of Colman and Buckley in the central role is undeniably the film’s greatest asset; the depth of character Gyllenhaal pulls from these two excellent leads, conveying their shared experience (they are, after all, playing the same person twenty years apart) while subtly reflecting Leda’s changes over time, makes the film one of the best character studies in recent memory.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” a fellow academic says in one of Leda’s flashbacks, establishing a sort of guiding philosophy for the whole film. “The Lost Daughter” is full of small details—peeled oranges, lines of Italian poetry, the stolen doll—that suggest this gracious act of attention, whether paid or not paid, received or rejected. The movie’s plainspoken realism may turn off viewers looking for more of a sense of closure, but the attention Gyllenhaal gives to these women, as troubled as they are, as miserable as they are, ultimately makes the film an act of heartfelt and generous storytelling.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 2/4/22.