The Lost Daughter (film)

While on holiday in Greece, middle-aged university professor and noted translator Leda Caruso meets Nina, a young mother, after Leda reunites Nina with her three-year-old daughter Elena, who has momentarily gone missing on the beach. Leda and Nina get talking, and Nina expresses her growing exhaustion and unhappiness. Elena is upset after she loses her favorite doll, which Leda has secretly taken. In flashbacks, it is shown that Leda also struggled with being a young mother to her two daughters, Bianca and Martha, often losing her patience and becoming withdrawn from her family. One evening Leda has dinner with Lyle, her holiday apartment's caretaker; he notices Leda has Elena's missing doll but doesn't comment on it, nor does he tell Nina. Leda later discovers Nina is having an affair with Will, who works at the beach bar; separately, Nina shares that her husband Toni is very controlling. The search for Elena's doll continues, with Nina even putting up flyers offering a reward for its return. At a market, Leda buys Nina a hatpin to help hold her sunhat in place. When Nina asks Leda about her daughters, Leda becomes emotional; she reveals that she had abandoned them with her now ex-husband for three years after she became too overwhelmed, during which time she had an affair with a fellow professor. She admits being away from her daughters felt "amazing", and she only went back to them when she genuinely missed them. Nina learns that Leda knows about her and Will, and he later asks Leda if they can borrow her apartment to have sex. When Nina arrives at Leda's to get the apartment keys the following day, Leda admits to being a selfish and "unnatural" mother and warns that Nina's depression will never go. She then gives Nina Elena's doll, confessing that she took it and that she was "just playing". Nina reacts angrily by stabbing Leda in the stomach with the hatpin before leaving. That night, Leda packs her bags and leaves the resort, but her stomach injury causes her to drive her car off the road; she soon collapses on the shoreline. The next morning, Leda awakens and calls Bianca, who happens to be with Martha. They express their relief to hear from their mother, from whom they had not heard in several days. Leda says she is fine and then looks down to discover an orange in her hands; she peels the orange skin off "like a snake", the way she had done for her daughters when they were little. ==Cast==

Maggie Gyllenhaal acquired the film rights to the Elena Ferrante novel in October 2018, and wrote and directed the adaptation. The lead character, Leda, says that she is named for the woman in the W. B. Yeats poem "Leda and the Swan", which Yeats based on the Leda story of Greek mythology. In February 2020, Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson and Peter Sarsgaard were cast in the film. In August, Paul Mescal was added, and in October 2020, Oliver Jackson-Cohen was cast as well, with Ed Harris, Dagmara Domińczyk, Jack Farthing and Alba Rohrwacher joining in November. Principal photography was filmed in Spetses, Greece, from September 28 to October 31, 2020. ==Music==

The film's score was written by Dickon Hinchliffe, and released as a separate album through Milan Records on December 17, 2021. Another album which featured the original songs written and performed by singer-songwriter Monika Christodoulou was released on December 24. ==Release==

The Lost Daughter had its world premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2021. In August 2021, Netflix acquired distribution rights to the film in the United States and several other countries, adding more markets, including the United Kingdom, in October. The film screened at film festivals in the Telluride, Hamptons, London, Lyon Metropolis, Mill Valley, Montclair, New York, San Diego (closing night), Zurich, and Whistler Film Festival. It was released in the United States on December 17, 2021, in a limited release prior to streaming on Netflix on December 31, 2021. ==Reception==

Critics At its opening night world premiere, the movie received a four-minute standing ovation from Venice Film Festival attendees in the Sala Grande. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 94% based on 237 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "A strikingly assured debut for writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter unites a brilliant cast in service of a daringly ambitious story." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 86 out of 100, based on reviews from 51 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "Still, no matter how flat The Lost Daughter can sometimes seem, there's always something to hold our attention. The movie is never great, but it's never exactly dull. There's always a reason to stick around for the next scene." Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times wrote: "Equal parts troubling and affecting, Leda epitomizes a type of woman whose needs are rarely addressed in American mainstream movies. We can dislike her, but we are never permitted to revile her." Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune wrote Gyllenhaal "keeps a close eye on what brings out the best in a scene, and in a story worth telling, with morally imperfect, fully dimensional, persistently human characters." Alissa Wilkinson of Vox wrote "The movie captures the spirit of the novel well. It's suspenseful, but it's not a thriller; there are elements of obsession and eroticism, but they never quite go where you expect. The end is deeply ambiguous, neither punishing nor condoning its characters' behavior. It simply asks us to sit with them — to pay them the respect of attention, and learn something about ourselves in the process." Actress and filmmaker Olivia Wilde praised the film, particularly Gyllenhaal's direction by saying "This unflinching new filmmaker only has time for the most interesting questions, it seems, and will not sanitize the narrative for our comfort. We have been warned: Maggie Gyllenhaal is here to push us to be a braver audience, and I, for one, am lapping it up from the front row." In June 2025, IndieWire ranked the film at number 31 on its list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 2020s (So Far)". Accolades ==References==