Film review: The Lost Daughter's brilliant performances paint a complex portrait of motherhood
Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley play an older and younger version of a woman torn between her children and her career
Olivia Colman’s Leda becomes fascinated with young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson) in The Lost Daughter.
The Lost Daughter opens December 17 at the Vancity Theatre and streams on December 31 on Netflix
TO SEE HOW much Olivia Colman brings to her compelling role as Leda in The Lost Daughter, just watch her deliver the film’s key line: “I’m an unnatural mother.” Even as she forms a shy, self-effacing grin, her eyes look on the verge of tears, her brow furrowed in something between anger and resignation.
What do her words mean? That motherhood never came naturally to her? That she couldn’t fit into the norms of that role in society? Or that her relationship to her children was simply strange? And what is a “natural” mother, anyway?
All of those questions will come into play, as Leda spends the movie unravelling them—Colman all complexity and contradictions in one of the year’s most transfixing character studies.
Her British languages professor has arrived alone on the Greek Island of Spetses, presumably as an escape from reality–though she’s quick to show everyone her stacks of books, reassuring them it’s a “working holiday”. Leda’s not here to make friends either, insisting on eating alone and refusing to give up her beach chair. She’s prone to focusing on all the minor inconveniences that are ruining her postcard perfection–including a large cicada fly that settles onto her pillow one night. What makes her so uncomfortable and prickly in this serene coastal retreat?
Despite the forcefield she erects around herself, Leda can’t help but get drawn into the drama of a vaguely sinister Italian-American-via-Queens family staying at the same beach. Watching young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson) struggling to parent a little girl who mauls her for attention prompts a flood of memories—especially when Leda helps Nina find the girl after she’s lost at the beach. Through flashbacks, we see her juggling postgraduate work while trying to raise two attention-starved young girls—living for the academic conferences that allow her to escape them.
For whatever reason, remembering the past prompts the present-day, slightly unhinged Leda to commit a small but reckless act of cruelty—or is it?—against the mother and daughter she’s been observing over her sunglasses.
Director Maggie Gyllenhaal handles all the subtle psychological tension with an insight that could only come from someone who’s spent uncountable hours cooped up in a house with demanding toddlers. There’s a suffocating, knowing intimacy to the way she shoots the extraordinary Jessie Buckley, as the younger Leda, her kids climbing her like a jungle gym, yanking at her until they hurt her, throwing tantrums, and ruining her sex life—solo or otherwise. Leda longs for intellectual status—and the affections of a passionate young prof (a magnetic Peter Sarsgaard)—but there’s a rawer, more primal attachment to her children, a bond that wracks her with guilt whenever she’s away from them.
Large parts of Leda remain a mystery in The Lost Daughter. What she wants and who she is seem irretrievably confused—perhaps a side effect for anyone who gives up their sense of self when they have children. Her story is small and everyday on paper, but thanks to intensely multilayered performances by Colman and Buckley, there’s a weight and tension that make the film as gripping as a thriller.
Gyllenhaal defies expectations for a movie centred around a middle-aged woman on an island vacation (hello, Mamma Mia!). In a more cliched film, Leda would hook up and find late-life love with Ed Harris’s kind island handyman Lyle; here, the question becomes whether she’ll chew him up and spit him out.
Never judgmental, Gyllenhaal has crafted something deep, unsettling, and brutally honest out of Italian author Elena Ferrante’s psychologically probing novel. Maybe Leda isn’t as similar to Nina as she thinks. And maybe she isn’t even that bad a parent. The brilliance of The Lost Daughter is that there are no easy answers—kind of like motherhood.
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