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The much-awaited film, The Lost Daughter, finally dropped on Netflix today, and it's cinema in its purest form.
The psychological drama is actor Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut and had its theatrical release earlier in December. The Lost Daughter revolves around a woman who is confronted by the troubles of her past when she meets a mother-daughter duo on her vacation.
Let's dissect and understand the ending of Netflix's The Lost Daughter.
Caution: This article contains spoilers.
Analyzing the end of 'The Lost Daughter'
Summary
The Lost Daughter opens with Leda arriving on a Greek island for a 'working vacation'. On her first day on the beach, she meets a loud family who asks Leda to move spots. But a young mother, Nina and her daughter Elena catches Leda's attention and the next day, the young girl goes missing.
Leda finds herself playing at a short distance, which gets her on the right page with the family. The experience in The Lost Daughter brings back strong memories of a young Leda losing her own daughter at the beach.
Through flashback-like scenarios in The Lost Daughter, viewers will get a glimpse of a young Leda as an ambitious professor, struggling to raise her two daughters while also trying to balance her study of Italian literature. Back in the present day, Leda returns to her car and heads home, along with Elena's stolen doll.
Over the next few days, Leda repeatedly runs into the family who seem distraught over the loss of the doll. Leda shares her own experience with her daughters, as a scene of a young Leda rolls in.
Viewers of The Lost Daughter will see a young Leda having an affair with a professor while her husband looks after their daughters at home.
Ending
Days pass by and Leda finally decides to return Elena's doll but while doing so, she finds Nina having an affair with the cafe man, Will. Leda reveals to Nina that in her younger days, she left her daughters and husband for three years and moved away.
Later, Nina visits Leda's apartment and asks if she can stay and continue her affair with Will, to which Leda agrees and reveals that she took Elena's doll. This leaves Nina in utter shock and storms out of the apartment after stabbing Leda with a hatpin.
That very night, Leda packs up and leaves the apartment. As she drives away, she falls asleep and there is a brief glimpse of her car crashing next to the sea.
She then walks over to the water's edge and passes out. When the sun rises, Leda is woken by the water lapping her face.
The Lost Daughter's closing moments see Leda talking to her daughters on the phone and she finally feels at peace. She then picks up an orange and begins to peel it, just how her girls like it. The film leaves viewers with enough ambiguity to question Leda's fate.
On the outside, it looks like she had a minor accident in which she slept off at the beach, but she finally gets the validation she had been seeking after learning that her daughters were trying to reach her.
Leda mysteriously picking up an orange and peeling it seems off in the beginning as she never had the orange in the first place. But throughout the film, the act of peeling has been connected with a happy memory of Leda and her daughters.
This is a very symbolic shot in The Lost Daughter as when Leda talks to her daughters in the present day, she starts peeling an orange, telling the viewers that she is happy.
In a different sense, the presence of the fruit hints at a version of Leda's afterlife. She might have died in the accident or by the sea and her waking up is actually the beginning to her afterlife.
This seems to be a possibility as the version of Leda seen at the end is very different from the one present throughout The Lost Daughter. She looks unburdened from her guilt and is finally reconnecting with her daughters. Since it's her afterlife, the act of peeling an orange made sense.
The end of The Lost Daughter is meant to be unclear and is different from the ending in the book. The conclusion is open to interpretation and this is further emphasized by the last dialog where Leda replies to Bianca that she is alive.
The stunning tale of motherhood, The Lost Daughter, is now available to stream on Netflix.
