Review: The Lost Daughter

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Maggie Gyllenhaal impresses on her first outing as a director with her adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel, "The Lost Daughter." Featuring a strong leading performance by the reliably excellent Olivia Colman, the film is an intriguing drama that plays like a thriller without actually being one.

In fact, the film has some of the ingredients of your typical noir - a lead character who is haunted by poor life choices of the past - as well as a concept well utilized by none other than Alfred Hitchcock - becoming engrossed in the story of strangers, and then paying a price for doing so - but the thriller you're expecting it to become never quite materializes.

Regardless, "The Lost Daughter" is the type of film in which you're never quite sure where it'll go next - that is, unless you've read the book - and that makes it all the more compelling. And Colman's character - whose personality runs the gamut from paranoid and outwardly frosty to warm and regretful - keeps the proceedings intriguing.

As the film opens, Leda (Colman) is settling into a vacation, of sorts, at a Greek island. She's staying at an apartment that isn't quite paradise - she finds a dead cicada on her pillow, and the fruit in the bowl on the table is rotten - but her surroundings are gorgeous - after all, it's Greece. The apartment's caretaker, Lyle - played by Ed Harris - seems to recognize early on that Leda is difficult, and she doesn't do much throughout the film to dispel his first impression, although the two will later become more simpatico.

Sitting on a beach chair one day, Leda takes interest in some dramas involving a particularly large family that is taking up much of the beach nearby. She's particularly interested in the tattooed young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), whose young daughter at one point goes missing, leading to a frantic search for the girl. Later, however, the girl's doll goes missing, which oddly enough makes up a large portion of the film's uneasy tension.

At first, Leda doesn't make much of a first impression on the family after she refuses to switch beach chairs with a pregnant member of the family, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who appears to be of the no-nonsense variety. But once she finds the missing girl, the family takes an interest in her as well, although a seasonal worker from Ireland warns her that the family is "not good people."

Then, something curious happens. We become privy to a series of flashbacks involving a younger Leda (played by Jessie Buckley) as she struggles to become an academic of note while caring for two demanding young daughters. She becomes smitten with a hot shot academic played by Peter Sarsgaard, and spends less time with her family. After a while, the scenes become less of a flashback and more of a completely separate story that comments on the one taking place in the present.

As I'd mentioned before, Leda often acts in a manner that is unexplainable. She appears paranoid when she believes she hears someone walking behind her on a wooded path, and when a pine cone falls and strikes her it makes us - and her - question whether, perhaps, it was thrown. The mystery surrounding the missing doll - about which I can't divulge too much - and the manner in which Leda acts regarding it are another mystery.

We begin to question the relationships of the other characters to her - she acts strangely toward Lyle, who seems harmless, while she takes a warmer approach to Nina, who seems like someone who is less likely to be trusted. And what's so impressive is the way that Gyllenhaal, as a first-time director, is able to convey this sense of danger and awkwardness by putting ourselves inside of Leda's head (Colman's strong performance should also obviously be credited here).

For a debut film, "The Lost Daughter" is impressively assured, and I look forward to seeing what Gyllenhaal does next time she, hopefully, gets behind the camera. And Colman continues to prove - along with her performances in "The Favourite" and "The Father" - that she's among the most interesting actresses to watch at the moment. This is a very engrossing film.