The Lost Daughter (2021)

[NotMySekrit2Tell]

Alone on a seaside vacation, Leda (Olivia Colman) becomes consumed with a young mother and daughter as she watches them on the beach. Unnerved by their compelling relationship (and their raucous and menacing extended family), Leda is overwhelmed by her own memories of the terror, confusion and intensity of early motherhood. An impulsive act shocks Leda into the strange and ominous world of her own mind, where she is forced to face the unconventional choices she made as a young mother and their consequences.

This made me more edgy and uncomfortable than most horror movies have. There's a constant sense of threat. I hadn't read the book, so I had no idea what was going to happen to this strange, damaged woman, for her real transgressions and in times when she's in the right (like trying to get a gang of crude young guys to stop disrupting a movie). And I loved it. Olivia Colman already won an Oscar for Best Actress a few years ago, so they'll probably given it to Kristen or Jessica, but she'd be deserving again. Great ensemble cast too. Jessie Buckley is uncanny as a younger Olivia in the '90s scenes. She nails the speaking style. 

It reminded me a little of Swimming Pool with Charlotte Rampling, but not as abstract. 

Great writing/directing debut for Maggie Gyllenhaal. I'm glad the women filmmakers are really bringing it this year and last. There was that year a few years back when people were complaining that not enough female-directed movies were winning prizes or getting nominated for them, and the movies they were making a case for were...not BAD, but like "sort of good if you squint at them and go into them with a lot of fond feeling for the director already." Like, I agree with your cause, but don't try to tell me that Honey Boy and Hustlers are worth putting in a time capsule.

[chediavolo]

Very disappointed in this this. Knowing it was taken from a book by the author of My Brilliant Friend & absolutely loved that series, this did not hold a candle.  Did not like the way they told the story. Also that the main character was so unlikeable did not help. 

[cpcathy]

This ended up being my favorite movie of the year. I am ready to see it again. Olivia is so good, yes, she’s drawn like a real person, with flaws, unlikeable characters are so interesting I never mind them. Great debut by Maggie, I wonder what she’ll choose next.

[SlovakPrincess]

I'll watch Olivia Coleman in pretty much anything (loved her in Broadchurch), so I of course checked this out.  

I will say the acting was, across the board, fantastic.  Even the little kids playing all the daughters (past and present) did a great job.  Dakota Johnson actually impressed me here, especially in the scenes where she does this ... searching thing with her eyes where she's trying to understand the Olivia Coleman character, and you can't tell if she's really trying to make a connection or simply size up someone she can manipulate.  Both Johnson and the actress that played the aggressive sister in law made me uncomfortable in a really effective way -- because you really could not trust these women even when they acted friendly, and every scene with them was tense.

This likely was a source material problem (the movie is based on a book) but I really couldn't get past the stupidity of

Spoiler

Leda keeping that doll and then admitting what she'd done.  I understand she was having a serious psychological guilt issue triggered by her past with her own daughters, but seriously ... the second the pool guy told her not to trust the aggressive resort family and confirmed they were "bad people" involved in shady stuff, she should've gotten rid of that dang thing.  And when she did return the doll -- just lie, lady!  Pretend you recently found it!  Say you held onto it for a bit because it was gross and had worms in it and you wanted to clean it up first!  So dumb to admit you stole a kid's doll and kept it knowing the kid was having a days-long meltdown over it.  Obviously one wouldn't foresee getting stabbed with a hatpin over this, but why on God's green earth she thought Nina would react rationally was beyond me.   

And all the drama seemed a bit silly when you find out her grown daughters still love her, are psyched to get a phone call from her, and seemingly have kept in touch with her.   From all the self-inflicted misery and fetishizing of that doll, I thought one of her daughters must have died or cut off contact.

There was a lot going on here, but it didn't all quite add up for me.  

[SlovakPrincess]

7 hours ago, NotMySekrit2Tell said:

...

It reminded me a little of Swimming Pool with Charlotte Rampling, but not as abstract. 

Great writing/directing debut for Maggie Gyllenhaal. I'm glad the women filmmakers are really bringing it this year and last. There was that year a few years back when people were complaining that not enough female-directed movies were winning prizes or getting nominated for them, and the movies they were making a case for were...not BAD, but like "sort of good if you squint at them and go into them with a lot of fond feeling for the director already." Like, I agree with your cause, but don't try to tell me that Honey Boy and Hustlers are worth putting in a time capsule.

Swimming Pool!  I knew the movie reminded me of something else I'd seen!  I really liked that one.

Funny you should mention Hustlers, which I only recently saw -- that movie certainly had it's moments but the theme overall is sort of laughable: "rah! rah! sisterhood and friendship while we drug men and steal their money!  And buy stupidly expensive clothes and cars with said money while rationalizing our actions by saying big business is bad and cutthroat!"  

[Simon Boccanegra]

8 hours ago, SlovakPrincess said:

This likely was a source material problem (the movie is based on a book) but I really couldn't get past the stupidity of

Leda behaves in such illogical ways, though, not only in the example you give, that I think there's something more going on. With respect to the doll, she's downright reckless, leaving it out in plain view twice when it would be easy to conceal it before admitting other people to her apartment. There are also scenes in which she behaves as though everyone suspects her. 

All of the Greece scenes had, to me, a dream-like quality, whereas the flashbacks with Jessie Buckley et al. seemed trustworthy. The final scene makes little sense in a realistic way, with the orange being produced out of nowhere, and the two twentysomething daughters being together and greeting her on the phone more as their small-child selves would have.

So I questioned the way we're supposed to read the whole film, and questioned the reliability of the central character, and I suspect I'd feel that way about what Elena Farrante wrote too. It's just peculiar, ambiguous material. Part of the discomfort factor is that things don't quite add up, yet there's a real-world menace on a moment-to-moment level: Dakota Johnson's spooky stares, Dagmara Dominczyk's hints of malice even when she's being nice and offering cake, the snake-like threat of the family's young and older men alike, the falling objects, the cicada on the pillow, the disruptions of the lighthouse (muted but insistent), Even the dinner scene with the Paul Mescal character, which starts pleasantly, goes subtly "off" as Leda babbles on too much information about her breast size, her daughters' breast sizes, etc. His fond stare seemed to me to turn into something else. 

People keep telling Leda she's so beautiful and she can't possibly be in her late forties. Olivia Colman is attractive, but not in a way that makes that flattery plausible. At first I was thinking this was just book dialogue and the author had visualized a very different-looking heroine. (The novel is about people from different regions of Italy.) But now I wonder if all of the Greece material is some dying fantasy. Two characters therein are versions of Leda on either side of her present midlife. The straying, imperfect young mother is her past; the old man distant from his family and in denial about it is her likely future. And her young self deals her a wound from which she may not recover.

No idea whether I was on the right track, or if there's even intended to be one way to take this one. But I found it an intriguing way to spend a couple hours, and I've thought about it since.

Edited January 10, 2022 by Simon Boccanegra

[Hava]

Just finished this movie. It was completely different from what I expected. I thought one of Leda's daughters had drowned, and so Leda was being judgmental of Nina's parenting and starting to become overprotective of Nina's daughter.

Boy, was I wrong. It was Nina that Leda was taking an interest in, not Nina's daughter. She identified with Nina and wanted to "save" her like she had said herself.

In the end, I don't know how to feel about this movie. I loved the performances, but the story did not meet up to the atmosphere/tone of the movie, if that makes sense. And it's hard for me to like movies where the main character is so unlikeable.

[Simon Boccanegra]

It's a bonus if characters are likable, but I've never needed it, and not every story lends itself to that.

I just want them to be fascinating and compelling. I feel that the woman in The Lost Daughter has those qualities, as (for example) Charles Foster Kane did, and the even less wholesome protagonists of films such as Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. 

Edited January 11, 2022 by Simon Boccanegra

[MaggieG]

On 1/10/2022 at 2:16 PM, Hava said:

Just finished this movie. It was completely different from what I expected. I thought one of Leda's daughters had drowned, and so Leda was being judgmental of Nina's parenting and starting to become overprotective of Nina's daughter.

Boy, was I wrong. It was Nina that Leda was taking an interest in, not Nina's daughter. She identified with Nina and wanted to "save" her like she had said herself.

In the end, I don't know how to feel about this movie. I loved the performances, but the story did not meet up to the atmosphere/tone of the movie, if that makes sense. And it's hard for me to like movies where the main character is so unlikeable.

This makes sense to me, as I felt the same way. I kept expecting something to happen to her at the hands of the family. Maybe one of the teenage boys, or the older gentleman or even Nina's husband. Why would she need to leave the party with Ed Harris when they showed up? She was just dancing. And at the movies, she was the only one who spoke up, everyone else just sat there. So everyone in this town is afraid of this family? It felt like two separate movies. One was the emotional/mother story where she tries to save Nina and thinks back on the decisions she made, the other was where she finds out something sinister about the family hidden in the doll (seriously, my mind went there!) and she got murdered by them. 

I will say I felt her rage when she was enjoying her ice cream on the beach, all relaxed and then all those obnoxious people showed up. Same in the theater when she was enjoying the movie and that gang of horrible teens showed up. We've all been there. 

[overtherainbow]

The film really does makes more sense if you consider it in the context of the novella by Elena Ferrante. In the novella, it was very obvious that the family were affiliated with the mafia and Lena had a lot of paranoia because she grew up around the mafia and became a professor to escape that environment and it's like it followed her on her vacation so there's this heavy tension and sense of dread throughout. 

Leda is a very unreliable narrator and you never really understand her thought processes. I think she ultimately took the doll because she wanted Nina to feel the way she felt, to experience what she felt to somehow justify her own decision to leave her daughters. She saw them having fun together at the beginning and it made her remember leaving her own daughter and what she lost. She made an assumption about Nina and her life from afar and knew how much the doll meant to the little girl. 

Why she didn't just lie about finding the doll instead of admitting to having took it is another question, especially after having been told they were bad people and not to be messed with. I think she felt for Nina in the moment. Her carelessness with the doll was interesting. One moment she wanted nothing to do with it, the next she's buying clothes for it and getting the water out of it. She even forgets where she put it.  

It's interesting how fruit of the womb plays such a subtle role in the film, both with the bowl of rotting fruit and Leda getting literally stabbed right in her womb after admitting to Nina that she's an "unnatural mother". Overall, I enjoyed it and I think it will stick with me for a while.

[caracas1914]

I liked the element of danger and foreboding Leda felt  with Nina and her extended family.  However it made sense to me that per her character, she would refuse to move from her spot on the beach.  Leda in a sense had courted "danger" all her life.  

She had courted being in moral danger with her very  life choices, but it was clear  she was not regretting putting herself first instead of her daughters, which to many is a monstrous choice.   She could sense Nina's sense of anxiety with motherhood and thought it mirrored her own exactly, which of course it did not.    So I think Leda always felt separate from so many mothers around her; even her memory of her daughters childhood experiences seems fractured and spotty.

What I found fascinating was  after deciding she is leaving husband/said daughter, her berating her husband for threatening to hand the children over to Leda's mother.   Leda throws out how selfish and uncaring that would be, as she was traumatized by her upbringing under that roof.    It makes absolutely no sense, but it rings true as to how screwed up people's family dynamics can be.  ("Your selfishness is worse than mine!")

 

Edited January 20, 2022 by caracas1914

[RunningMarket]

On 1/19/2022 at 6:34 PM, overtherainbow said:

The film really does makes more sense if you consider it in the context of the novella by Elena Ferrante. In the novella, it was very obvious that the family were affiliated with the mafia and Lena had a lot of paranoia because she grew up around the mafia and became a professor to escape that environment and it's like it followed her on her vacation so there's this heavy tension and sense of dread throughout. 

Leda is a very unreliable narrator and you never really understand her thought processes. I think she ultimately took the doll because she wanted Nina to feel the way she felt, to experience what she felt to somehow justify her own decision to leave her daughters. She saw them having fun together at the beginning and it made her remember leaving her own daughter and what she lost. She made an assumption about Nina and her life from afar and knew how much the doll meant to the little girl. 

Why she didn't just lie about finding the doll instead of admitting to having took it is another question, especially after having been told they were bad people and not to be messed with. I think she felt for Nina in the moment. Her carelessness with the doll was interesting. One moment she wanted nothing to do with it, the next she's buying clothes for it and getting the water out of it. She even forgets where she put it.  

It's interesting how fruit of the womb plays such a subtle role in the film, both with the bowl of rotting fruit and Leda getting literally stabbed right in her womb after admitting to Nina that she's an "unnatural mother". Overall, I enjoyed it and I think it will stick with me for a while.

This helps tremendously, and was sorely missing from the movie. My husband and I watched it a few days ago, and while we enjoyed it from the perspective of it was well acted, we just felt we weren't sure what we were supposed to get out of it, or what the point was.

It seems, at least from the ending, that Leda never really "lost" a daughter, so again, confused what the point was supposed to be.

[snickers]

On 1/20/2022 at 9:45 PM, RunningMarket said:

It seems, at least from the ending, that Leda never really "lost" a daughter, so again, confused what the point was supposed to be.

I'm assuming the novel explains why it is called the Lost Daughter.....I too was in the camp that thought one of the daughters was dead, they did show that scene of one of them missing in the beginning....

 

I didn't hate the move, but I didn't like it either, it was so-so to me.  I thought Dakota J. did pretty good considering her other work, and Olivia Coleman always does great, but, I just wasn't wowed by this at all....one thing I did like and appreciate, was that this was a film that showed a different side of being a parent and hardships of it.....and her truthful answer when she said she liked being gone for two years and didn't regret it.

[Bastet]

On 1/9/2022 at 4:53 PM, Simon Boccanegra said:

But now I wonder if all of the Greece material is some dying fantasy.

I kept expecting a revelation to that effect in the end.

This was an odd film, but I liked a lot about it.