Maggie Gyllenhaal, mostly known for her work as an actress, makes her directing debut with the film The Lost Daughter, a movie that really impresses. Her work is focused on motherhood in all its shapes, we get to follow the main character Leda (played by Olivia Colman) who works as a professor in the US as she decides to travel to Greece for a summer holiday.
Leda, a professor in Literature, spends her summer holiday in Greece while on a working holiday. The movie centres around the different shapes of motherhood, not only the pleasant ones. The movie is based on Elena Ferrante's book (2006) with the same name. Olivia Colman is brilliant in her acting when we get to know her character more deeply and how she believes she does not fit in the role as a mother but how it is to be human and want other things in life, not just being a mother. She brings with her a very uncomfortable presence that we in the audience also get to feel. Her existence on the island is disturbed by a very noisy family but Leda finds an unsuspected friendship with a young mother, Nina (played by Dakota Johnson). A friendship that brings out quite a shameful feeling of care as Leda is both reminded of a faulting motherhood but also sees a bit of herself in Nina. We get to travel back in time getting to know Leda as a young mother (played by Jessie Buckley) and how Ledas story evolves from how she was as a mother until now and how she isn't a very sympathetic person. Another very good performance is by Ed Harris as Lyle, a caretaker for some of the houses in the neighbourhood.
This is quite a debut for Maggie Gyllenhaal but the script, combined with well composed music and photography that brings us incredibly close to the characters, makes this movie a hidden gem of 2022.
The Lost Daughter premieres on the 4th of March 2022.
