Review of reviews: Film
“To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. What Maggie Gyllenhaal has accomplished in her first outing as a director would not have been possible if she’d gone in with a fixed idea of how to proceed. Instead, in adapting Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel about maternal ambivalence, she remained alert to what her actors brought to the story, adjusting accordingly. “That’s what makes this movie so effective, so alive.” Olivia Colman stars as Leda, a divorced British academic in her late 40s who’s vacationing alone on a Greek island when a large, boorish American family intrudes, and Colman’s performance is “something quite extraordinary,” said Jessica Kiang in IndieWire.com. “It’s difficult to imagine that anyone else would be able to take this impossible role, in all its unlikability, and make it seem more real for all its contradictions.” Prickly at the start, Leda soon endears herself to the newcomers when she finds a young girl who had wandered off at the beach, panicking the family. But Leda also cruelly deceives the family and becomes obsessed with a young mother, played by Dakota Johnson, who exhibits a reluctance to disappear into a maternal role. Jessie Buckley plays Leda in flashbacks that illuminate motivation, helping to make this conflicted figure “one of the richest characters that has ever graced our screens,” said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press. And though action is limited in The Lost Daughter, “there’s an element of danger, real and theoretical, permeating every moment of Gyllenhaal’s electric adaptation.” (In theaters now; on Netflix Dec. 31)