The Lost Daughter
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Written by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elena Ferrante
Starring Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson
Release Date December 31st, 2021
Few movies have triggered my secondhand embarrassment senses like The Lost Daughter. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut stars Oscar winner Olivia Coleman as a college professor on holiday in Rome. Coleman’s Leda is desperately awkward and incapable of relating to other, lesser human beings. We get a sense of Leda in her first interaction with Lyle (Ed Harris), the caretaker of the apartment she has rented for her vacation. Lyle, in his 70s, is struggling while carrying her remarkably heavy bag to her room and yet he still tries to flirt with the near 50 year old Leda, much to her confusion and dismissiveness.
It’s deeply weird and awkward and a credit to Maggie Gyllenhaal for capturing the feeling of two people deeply NOT connecting in the same way. This pattern will repeat throughout The Lost Daughter as the character of Leda appears incapable of relating to people on a base level. That fact has little to do with the story at play in The Lost Daughter, rather it is just the default mode of the character who seems to carry some sort of childhood trauma through her life that only allows her to interact with a select group of people in any kind of comfortable fashion and only on her terms.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.
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