A middle-aged English woman holidays by herself in Greece and creates unresolvable tension where none need exist. There. That’s the plot. Now you can decide if you really need to see the film solely on the basis of two Oscar-nominated performances.
In a deliberately confusing and off-putting film, 48-year-old –this comes up more than once- Comp/Lit prof/scholar Leda (Olivia Colman) goes to Greece to soak up rays and attention (?) Well, that’s quite not it; Leda clearly doesn’t want any attention during her holiday … so then why does she instigate a completely unnecessary controversy?
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Leda rents a blah apartment somewhere driving distance to the kind of beach where they give you private attention (whether you want it or not). Leda clearly enjoys having the place to herself, and is a bit put off when other guests arrive to interrupt her one-piece loafing. She even kicks things up a notch when a clan shows up for a birthday and Leda refuses to move so they can all be together. Shortly afterwards, she redeems herself when clan vixen Nina (Dakota Johnson) loses her daughter and Leda helps find her.
The film then jumps back-and-forth recalling a younger Leda (Jessie Buckley) supervising her own young daughters … oh, and lemme tell ya, not a single child under the age of ten comes off well 
in this film. Gee, movie, why do you hate children? Reminiscing on what a shitty time she had parenting, Leda strolls away from the beach that afternoon with The Lost Daughter’s doll in her purse.
What do we make of this? Did Leda do this or did somebody plant it on her? Is somebody screwing with Leda? Is she a closet kleptomaniac? Did she lose her mind? Is she making friends the very hard way? Well, one way or another, this can be solved in three seconds; with a decent lie, she won’t even have to apologize. Then “three seconds” becomes … for the rest of the entire film. This bit of petty larceny drives Leda’s odd behavior and accounts –one way or another- for all her actions until the end of the film. And if I wasn’t clear about this before, there are only two people we follow in this film: current Leda and young mother Leda.
The Lost Daughter reminds me a lot Olivia Colman’s last film, The Father – another subversive mind screw. But The Lost Daughter isn’t as good for the basic reason that I think you have to have read the source material (novel by Elena Ferrante) to understand what’s going on. Otherwise, it seems like the drifting self-defeating narrative of a woman who hates her children almost as much as she loves them. I don’t say this a bad topic for a movie, but it’s not a great one – and it comes off here as both self-indulgent and “why did you make this film?” Only the outstanding work by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley keeps me from panning this film outright.
There once was a long divorced spouse
Whose actions suggested a louse
She took a girl’s doll
And ignored her pained call
Aren’t you too old for Barbie’s Dream House?
Rated R, 121 Minutes
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Writer: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Genre: WTF?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People haunted by their own pasts
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who like it when things are explained or plots move
