‘The Lost Daughter’ Dares To Show the Ugly Side of Motherhood

Warning: This article contains The Lost Daughter spoilers. Save this one to read until after you’ve seen the film.

The Lost Daughter, which is now streaming on Netflix, is rife with fathers who simply opt-out of parenthood. A Greek-American patriarch absconds for days at a time during a summer vacation, leaving his young daughter with his young wife. An old innkeeper barely knows his three children; hasn’t spoken to them in years. A free-spirited hiker left his boys with their mother to travel the world with his Italian lover. All of these absent fathers have an air of casualness to them, of normalcy. This is an option for them—not a celebrated one, but an option nonetheless.

It is, technically, an option for mothers as well. But, as this new drama from director Maggie Gyllenhaal highlights, when women take that option, there is nothing normal or casual about it. In fact, it is a decision that feels so catastrophic, so staggeringly wrong, that it’s akin to the feeling of losing a child. This is the feeling The Lost Daughter evokes.

As I was watching The Lost Daughter, I was certain that a child was going to die. There’s a sense of impending doom surrounding the film, which Gyllenhaal adapted from the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante. Olivia Colman stars as a professor named Leda, who is on vacation on a small Greek island. There, Leda observes a young mother named Nina (Dakota Johnson) who is staying with her family nearby. Seeing herself in Nina, Leda is bombarded by memories of her own past as a young mother struggling to raise two girls.

The movie’s title hangs ominously over the story. In one scene, Nina loses track of her daughter at the beach, and we flash back to Leda as a young mother, now played by Jessie Buckley. As Nina screams out for her daughter, a young Leda screams for her daughter, Bianca. Nina’s daughter is found, by the present-day Leda. But we never see Bianca reunite with a young Leda in the past. In another scene, present-day Leda tells Nina’s pregnant sister that “children are a crushing responsibility,” over birthday cake. In the flashbacks, a young Leda is at her wit’s end, losing her patience, snapping at her girls, and slamming doors. The sense that something horrible happened to Leda’s children—and that it was all Leda’s fault—builds.

In the end, Leda’s children are fine. Nina’s daughter is fine. No child dies. The big reveal, when it comes, is that Leda abandoned her family for three years, when her oldest daughter was 7 and the youngest was 5. She was fed up and overwhelmed, so she ran off with the man she was having an affair with, leaving her husband and her mother to take care of the children. Three years later, she came back, because she missed them. “I’m a very selfish person,” Leda tells Nina after she confesses to her sin.

It’s clear that Leda carries enormous guilt. As a mother, she’s done the unthinkable. And yet, you understand her. In the flashback scenes, Buckley makes you feel every iota of Leda’s exhaustion, of her desperation, and of her confinement. I’m not a mother but, watching Leda lie on the floor, drifting off to sleep, no energy left, while her daughter tugs relentlessly on her hair, I felt profoundly connected to her. She’s young, and she’s desperate to live her own life, to pursue her own career, to have her own adventures. But she can’t. It’s not an option. Her children’s father, Joe (Jack Farthing) is an ambitious academic, just like her, and doesn’t offer much help. He goes on work trips, leaving her alone, and her patience wears even thinner. But she can’t escape. She has no way out.

Until, one day, she realizes that she does. Joe and Leda take the girls on a family vacation and meet a couple who are hiking in the mountains. The male hiker, it’s revealed, has left his three kids behind with their mother, and is now free to backpack around the world with his lover, an Italian woman with whom Leda feels a deep connection. Before they leave, Leda, an Italian scholar, whispers a question to the woman: “Are his kids OK? The girls?”

The woman gives her an odd look, and replies, “Not girls. Boys.”

This one line sums up the film’s point: Society has told us that motherhood is required, while fatherhood is optional. It’s not equal, it’s not fair, and when Leda’s girls grow up, they’ll have to deal with the same double standard, if they have kids of their own. Men can leave. Women can’t… unless they choose to defy what we’ve been told is the natural order of the world. You’re not exactly cheering Leda on for her decision to leave her kids, but it takes on a new, morbidly admirable light.

It’s an act of transgression, and there is no doubt her children suffered for it… Leda never forgave herself, even 20 years later. It’s left a stain on her life. It’s affected her in a way it seems it hasn’t affected the absent fathers she meets. It’s not fair, and, The Lost Daughter posits, perhaps it never will be. Motherhood might be beautiful, but that truth is ugly. The Lost Daughter is the rare film brave enough to say so, to speak up for the mothers who feel like they can’t.

Watch The Lost Daughter on Netflix