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2021 has been a year for true cinema with all its sci-fi epics, deeply rooted psychological dramas, and superhero films, and Netflix's latest release The Lost Daughter is one of them.
Directed and written by Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter is an adaptation of Elena Ferrante's 2006 novel of the same name. It revolves around a middle-aged woman on a vacation who finds herself obsessed with another young woman and her daughter, prompting her own memories of her early motherhood.
Note: This article contains spoilers and reflects the opinion of the writer.
'The Lost Daughter': Detailed review
Netflix's The Lost Daughter opens up with Leda on her 'working vacation' in Greece. She is happy and content, visiting the beach everyday, reading, swimming and keeping to herself. She has a good caretaker, Lyle, who is kind and helpful every now and then. But there's something unusual about Leda and her responses. She is a polite woman but isn't good with social interactions; she only waits for conversations to end.
Her sweet vacation gets disrupted by a boisterously loud American family who arrive at the beach. The men, women and children are loud, which makes it hard for Leda to concentrate on her reading, so she decides to watch them and put together who is who in the family. She finds herself particularly drawn to a young woman, Nina, and her daughter Elena. Her focus on the mother-daughter duo is too intense.
Leda is then greeted by a heavily pregnant woman, Callie, who asks her to switch to another chair so that her family can sit together, but she refuses. This drives Callie mad which leads to Leda receiving hostile glances from the entire family for the rest of the day. She comes back the next day and slowly befriends Nina and her family.
The Lost Daughter has mysterious present day sequences interwoven with scenes from Leda's life twenty years prior. They aren't exactly flashbacks, as they run parallel with the present day and fill in Leda's story.
A younger version of her is frazzled, irritated and overwhelmed with trying to balance her career with parenting two clingy girls. Things take a different turn when a celebrity scholar, Professor Hardy, shows interest in her work. This pushes her to the edge to do the unthinkable, but the kind of thing that makes her feel free from all her responsibilities.
Back to the present day in The Lost Daughter, Leda takes on a motherly role when it comes to Nina but there's something off about it as her interest is too intense. As for Nina, her character is a fascinating mix of pleasure and desperation. She dislikes her family and 'acts' around them but Callie sees it all and no one wants to mess with her.
Leda is a somewhat unreliable narrator. She is so consumed with herself that her every interaction seems no less than a threat or insecurity, and she has the habit of projecting her unresolved issues onto other people. She likes to misinterpret the 'unspoken' gestures, like body launguage and pauses. She perceives threats when there may not be any and has so far managed to misinterpret Lyle's and Will's kindness.
As Leda's story unfolds, viewers will learn what she was back in the day, but her choices, like the vacation, seem to remain in question. It is hard to figure out what exactly is going with Leda, as she has an intellect with a symbolic Yeatsian name, but things did start to go strange after she arrived in the small town.
The Lost Daughter might be Maggie Gyllenhaal's first directorial, but it is for the grown-ups, because it is unpredictable and confrontational. The film accepts the ugliness of motherhood and as a movie, it gives itself space to express and exist.
There's some connection between all the emotional chaos around that beach in The Lost Daughter, the daughters present, and the daughters lost. Gyllenhaal does not try to nail down this chaos but allows it to happen. She also lets Leda stay a mystery, as she does not wish to race for clarity.
Her approach to The Lost Daughter is very similar to Leda's point of view - turbulent, subjective and almost claustrophobic. Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley gave one of the best performances of the year by portraying Leda. Their character is pretentious, distressed, impulsive, sloppy and a liar.
The Lost Daughter is unnerving, unsettling and unpredictable. It's one of those films that is relatable with its characters, reflecting back to one's own experiences, and giving validation to them. The film shows the things one doesn't want to look at, the ugly and dark parts of motherhood, where one does not always give their best. These are the things that are deemed true and relatable.
The Lost Daughter is now streaming on Netflix.
