Early in The Lost Daughter, a 48-year-old college professor named Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman) is having a terse conversation at a Greek seaside resort with a bossy woman named Callie (Dagmara Domińczyk), who is heavily pregnant with her first child and celebrating her 42nd birthday. Earlier, Leda had ruffled some feathers by refusing to move down the beach to another chair, when Callie’s big, boisterous family invaded the spot where she was trying to relax. As a passive-aggressive peace offering, Callie pressures Leda into having a bite of her birthday cake. In return Leda—the mother of two children, both in their 20s—offers some not-so-encouraging words. She smiles thinly at this stranger whom she clearly dislikes and warns, “Children are… a crushing responsibility.”
The Lost Daughter is based on a 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author best known for the four-volume “Neapolitan Novels,” adapted into the HBO series My Brilliant Friend. Actor Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her feature filmmaking debut (as writer, director, and co-producer) with a movie that doesn’t shy away from the beguiling ambiguities of Ferrante’s fiction. This is the story of a brilliant academic who has spent much of her adult life pursuing the very reasonable desire to have some time alone with her thoughts—which is something that kids, needy lovers, demanding bosses, and obnoxious tourists make extremely difficult.
The plot is slight, but it has an effective hook. As Leda tries to find a little peace and quiet to read and write, she keeps getting distracted by the property manager (Ed Harris) hitting on her, and by Callie’s clan barging into seemingly every recreational activity to make her uncomfortable. Then she encounters Callie’s sister-in-law, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who is frustrated by the demands of her toddler daughter and regularly squabbling with her husband, Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen)—a man who, it is subtly suggested, might be involved in organized crime. Leda sees a kindred spirit in Nina and wants to help her out, but there’s one big obstacle: For reasons she can’t entirely explain, Leda has stolen Nina’s daughter’s favorite doll.
The Lost Daughter is structured a little bit like a dark comedy and a little bit like a mystery, frequently looking back at the life of Leda as a young mother (played by Jessie Buckley), leading up to a moment in her past that still looms across her memories like a chilling shadow. Gyllenhaal teases that moment out, hinting at what it might be but not revealing it until about two-thirds of the way through the picture. The rest of the time, the film is about the moment-to-moment reactions of Leda—in her 20s and her 40s—to a world full of irritants.
Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Hélène Louvart put the audience inside Leda’s head via a lot of forced perspectives and clever staging. During one-on-one conversations, most of the characters are seen in close-ups that look just a little closer than usual, bordering on the imposing. The rest of the time, the characters seem so far away from Leda that they’re almost hard to see, although they often seem to be looking right at her, and judging her.
Colman, Buckley, and Johnson are all outstanding, playing mothers who love their kids but are ambivalent about the never-ending job of being “Mom.” The flashback sequences have a cumulative power, showing how the men in Leda’s circle get to float in and out of fatherhood freely. Meanwhile, she’s expected to do insightful Italian translations of English poetry while a 5-year-old pokes her in the back of the head repeatedly and asks her how to spell “volcano.”
Leda finally gets a chance to live her best life at a prestigious academic conference, where she’s flattered and lusted after by a handsome scholar. (In a sly bit of casting, Gyllenhaal has her own husband, Peter Sarsgaard, play the most desirable professor in academia.) Yet even then, Leda can’t leave home without making sure she has a refrigerator full of pre-made meals for her children—something her gruff boss likely didn’t have to consider before he jetted off to deliver his paper.
The Lost Daughter runs out of steam by the end of its two hours. Once Leda’s past secret has been revealed and the matter with the doll is resolved, the story stumbles quickly to an ambiguous ending that isn’t wholly satisfying (although it mostly follows Ferrante’s book). Still, for most of the movie’s running time, Gyllenhaal pulls off a remarkable trick, turning everyday inconveniences like rotting fruit and rude people—and deeper existential crises like regretting parenthood—into sources of nerve-jangling tension. The film is like a chase picture, with a heroine racing in vain to escape societal expectations.