I hope you’re not sick of seeing Oliva Colman at awards shows because wow does she knock The Lost Daughter out of the park. As Leda, a nearly 50-year-old single professor on holiday in Greece all on her lonesome, the actress continues her legendary streak of great and diverse roles that she totally and completely makes her own. Here, she subtly peels back the layers of a seemingly wise but particular woman into something more neurotic and manic, as a family vacationing in her vicinity triggers an intense guilt over her past as a mother.
Adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, the ever-talented Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her debut as director and screenwriter with The Lost Daughter. And what a brazen debut it is. Taking on the cultural taboo of a mother who doesn’t want to be one, to the point of at least temporary refusal, the film is an honest and emotional portrait of a dissatisfied mother figure through two timelines. The main action sees Colman as Leda fostering an obsession with Nina (Dakota Johnson), a young mother who loses her daughter on the beach only for Leda to be the one to find her and put an end to the frantic search. All the while, flashbacks in which Jessie Buckley plays Leda when she’s about the same age as Nina show us the struggles of a woman whose ambitions lie beyond homemaking and child rearing.
The plot set in the present toys with becoming a thriller as the film progresses, and a great one at that. There’s a remarkable intrigue as Leda involves herself with Nina and her large, boisterous family of in-laws vacationing alongside her husband and young daughter. At the risk of spoiling the film’s smartest, character-altering reveal at the end of act one, let’s just say that Leda creates a tension for herself for every moment she ends up interacting with Nina or her family. Colman keeps the whole thing grounded, sprinkling in some very welcome humor in how she flirts with men young and old (characters charmingly played by Ed Harris and Paul Mescal both make passes at Leda) and makes flippant but empathetic comments about what Nina is going through. But in her solo scenes, of which there are many, she expresses deep guilt and self-doubt with the emotional precision only the greatest actors of our time exhibit.
But where the A plot feels daring and original, the extensive flashbacks tell a more familiar story as they weigh down the two-hour runtime. Buckley is undoubtedly strong as the younger Leda, who we see abandon her children in real time, but these scenes cost The Lost Daughter a lot of its narrative flow. Tension is missing here, as once we understand that the sorrow on Colman’s face is actually guilt, the flashbacks start to run longer to fully explain what could have been a few great delivers from Colman. On top of that, Gyllenhaal makes the mistake of never really letting the longer flashbacks get their foot on the ground aesthetically. Intense closeups and quick cuts abound here, but these techniques work better for quick flashes, not long sequences that mostly amount to visual exposition for the A plot.
These sequences are still very much in the minority in the grand scheme of the film, but they do interrupt the much more thrilling Colman timeline consistently throughout. Every return to the present is worth it, however. This thoughtful meditation on the intersection of motherhood and female ambition is worth investigating to the fullest, and that’s exactly what Gyllenhaal delivers and then some. If these are the types of films the actor-turned-writer-director is going to make—not to mention the performances she’s going to pull from her cast—then one can only hope Gyllenhaal becomes the next great cinema auteur.
