Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Lost Daughter’ on Netflix, a Drama About the Travails of Motherhood, With Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley

Netflix film The Lost Daughter is an Olivia Colman acting showcase, and if you’re not up for that, then you’re not up for anything. The Oscar, Emmy, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Critic’s Choice, SAG and British Film Institute award winner – that that, Streep! – anchors the directorial debut by Maggie Gyllenhaal, adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel. Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris and Peter Sarsgaard are slotted in supporting roles. If all this adds up to a probable top-10-of-2021 contender, such an assessment wouldn’t quite be accurate – it’s quite clearly a contender for THE best film of 2021.

THE LOST DAUGHTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Leda (Colman) hangs her head out the car window, relishing the seaside air. She’s alone, on a working holiday in Greece. She rents an apartment that’s a short walk to the beach, where she’ll pore over books and papers – she’s a literature professor at Cambridge in Boston – while soaking up some sun. Lyle is an older American gent who (Harris) manages the property, and Will (Paul Mescal) is an Irish college student who works the beachside concession; Leda has slightly awkward interactions with them in response to their acts of kindness, leading one to believe she’s a prickly sort who’d rather be alone. Or maybe we’re just misinterpreting her self-assurance and assertiveness. Hard to tell.

A day or two of solitude for Leda comes to an end when a large extended family descends on the beach with a flurry of loudly cursing, slightly intimidating men and noisy children. Leda watches them with a slight scowl. She seems mildly obsessed with the interactions of a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her preschool-age daughter, prompting flashbacks to roughly 20 years prior, when Leda (Buckley) was a budding academic, married and raising two young girls. It’s a struggle for younger Leda, who seems to enjoy playing with her girls at the same time she’s utterly taxed by them, pushed to her limits, torn between her career work and raising her family.

The next day, the disruptive family is even larger. They ask Leda to shift over to the next umbrella spot on the beach so they can all be together. “I have no desire to move,” she replies. They call her various four-letter words. But she stays put. After a while, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who’s pregnant, offers Leda an olive branch: A slice of birthday cake and an apology. They chat politely for a few minutes – how far along are you, and all that – before Leda apologizes in return, and it seems mostly sincere, and perhaps slight, but Leda is so very hard to read sometimes.

One day Leda is on her beach lounger looking over her papers and books and intently watching the loud family, especially when Nina and her husband get into an ugly argument, and soon realize the little girl is missing. They panic. The family becomes a search party. Then we see younger Leda, at the beach, one of her girls on her hip as she frantically searches for the other. Leda offers a word of reassurance to Nina before joining the search, and soon finds the girl playing quietly in a nearby patch of woods. Maybe this will smooth any remaining tensions between Leda and the group – if anything is ever quite smoothed over with Leda. Nina thanks her; in the background, the little girl is distraught. Now they can’t find her favorite doll. They search and search. Long day. Leda offers a word of kindness and returns to her apartment and opens her bag and pulls out the doll.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Lost Daughter echoes some of the motherly struggles Gyllenhaal tackled in the lead role of Sherrybaby; Colman’s characterization of a stubbornly self-reliant woman brings to mind Kate Winslet in Ammonite or Tilda Swinton in A Bigger Splash (which also starred Johnson, in a similar role).

Performance Worth Watching: The only upsetting thing about Colman and Buckley playing the same character? They don’t share any scenes together. Two of the strongest actresses in the game today – Colman’s The Favourite and Buckley’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things are both knockouts – further cement the assertion that any movie they’re in is a must-see.

Memorable Dialogue: Leda to Callie: “Children are a crushing responsibility. Happy birthday.”

Sex and Skin: Slight toplessness in a reasonably warm, realistic sex scene.

Our Take: For Leda, motherhood is maddening. Nothing is more joyful or frustrating. She sees her life roughly two decades prior as harried and stifling. There’s a moment when Leda gives her favorite childhood doll to her young daughters, and one of them spitefully defaces it. Maybe that explains the theft of the doll – from a family that’s vaguely and unpropitiously described by Will as “bad people” – which she keeps throughout the film, sometimes cuddling it as she sleeps, its fate held in suspense, a strange, sometimes disturbing thread drawing together the drama of this engrossing character study.

Why doesn’t she just give the doll back? Tell them she found it hidden along the path to the beach? She buys clothes for it at a local toy shop, where she runs into Nina and Callie, who question why she’d be buying toys. She’s not a grandmother, right? And then Leda has one of the frequent anxious, dizzy spells she’s experienced for years. We could spend an inordinate amount of time examining Colman and Buckley’s actions, mannerisms, expressions for hints of Leda’s character facets, who she is, who she was, where she might’ve come from (the film stubbornly, and perhaps wisely, avoids directly addressing her upbringing). Our inability to put Leda under our thumbs renders the drama fascinating and unpredictable. She’s difficult. She’s warm. She’s self-centered. She’s selfless. She’s cruel. She’s kind. She carries within her multitudes. Don’t we all, when we get to know each other and ourselves very well?

We sense Gyllenhaal, Colman, and Buckley wrestling with the complex emotional experience that is motherhood. It can’t be pinned down. Gyllenhaal maintains intent focus on Leda’s point of view – her voyeur’s eye as she judges Nina and her family from afar is particularly revealing. She seems disgusted by chaos and togetherness. In one of the flashback sequences, a weekend away from her family is a joy, in its solitude, in its rewards for her passionate career pursuit, which yields affirmation in the form of a pretentious, bearded, lusty academic (if you ever need to cast a pretentious, bearded, lusty academic, Peter Sarsgaard is your man) who’s drawn to her through her work.

It’s no surprise to see Gyllenhaal inspire such depth of performance from her cast – her own work in front of the camera is frequently sensitive and intricate. But her control over the material, its assured pace, its tangible tension, its thoughtful but modest visual presentation, adheres tightly to her tantalizingly ambiguous approach to character. With The Lost Daughter, she molds characters, nurtures atmosphere and invokes emotions – love, longing, fear, melancholy – that cling to the memory, lingering long after its exquisitely composed final shot. It feels like the work of a seasoned filmmaker.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Lost Daughter is an extraordinary drama. It grabs you and won’t let go.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream The Lost Daughter on Netflix