‘Lost Daughter’ no simple psychological thriller

Above: Olivia Colman stars in the Netflix film "The Lost Daughter." (Photo/Netflix)

Movie review: "The Lost Daughter," written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, starring Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgaard. Streaming on Netflix.

The Italian writer Elena Ferrante specializes in stories that center on life in her native Naples. She’s known, mostly, for what are called her Neapolitan Novels, a quartet the first volume of which is titled “My Brilliant Friend” and which was the basis for a similarly titled 2018 HBO miniseries.

But Ferrante, who is notoriously private – in fact, the very name Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym – has written a number of other books as well. One published in 2008 bore the title “The Lost Daughter.”

And that relatively short, 140-odd-page novel is what writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress known for starring in such films as “Secretary” and “The Dark Knight,” chose to adapt as her first feature film. Starring Olivia Colman, along with such recognizable supporting players as Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris and Peter Sarsgaard, the film focuses on a woman vacationing in Greece.

Leda (the character played by Colman) is a Cambridge University professor and noted Italian translator. She’s on holiday at a resort (the film was shot on the Greek island of Spetses), and the idyllic setting gives her every reason to believe she’ll have an enjoyable stay.

She does encounter a few inconveniences. The many steps up to her room, for one. And the ongoing drone of a coastal foghorn, for another. Then just as Leda discovers that the bowl of fruit in her room isn’t quite as fresh as she first imagined, the peaceful nature of the resort, too, proves illusory.

 While basking on the beach one day, Leda is surprised by a large family – composed of obnoxious teenagers and their equally loud-mouthed parents – who invade her space. And she doesn’t respond graciously. When the family matriarch (played by Dagmara Dominczyk) asks Leda if she will move – so that, the woman explains, the family can sit together – Leda refuses.

It’s this refusal that both gives us a glimpse at the contradictions inherent in Leda’s character and sets up what comes next. Besides attracting the attention of the family members – whom Leda later is told “are bad people” – she is drawn particularly to one. Nina, a young mother (played by Johnson), is having problems with her barely-more-than-a-toddler daughter. Though only implied at first through furtive glances, Leda and Nina end up forming a bond.

That bond, naturally enough, is based on motherhood – or, to be more specific, the trials of motherhood. Of marriage, too, for that matter – as we discover in flashbacks that feature Buckley as the young Leda. Straining to raise two daughters, keep her marriage together and yet construct a career as a scholar, the young Leda shows both sides of her temperament: a loving, caring person who at times can act out angrily. Middle-age Leda shares the same traits, even as memories of her angry side still hound her with regret.

We learn all this gradually, as Gyllenhaal – following Ferrante’s lead – skips back and forth from present to past, documenting the young Leda’s missteps, from having an affair to abandoning for a time her children, while exploring her current situation, which sees her acting, on occasion, impulsively.

Even after one day finding Nina’s lost daughter, an event that had the entire resort concerned, Leda does something inexplicable. Even she can’t explain what possessed her, but the act heightens the film’s tension. And following the opening scenes, which offer a dark foreshadowing, the tension proceeds to an ending that is as opaquely – and frustratingly – open-ended as it is haunting.

Colman and Buckley turn in their usual fine performances as the two Ledas, while Sarsgaard – Gyllenhaal’s real-life husband – Domińczyk and Paul Mescal as a friendly young waiter – all add nice touches. The real star of “The Lost Daughter,” though, is Gyllenhaal, who shows in her first directorial effort the ability to skillfully tell a multi-layered story, one that manages, in the guise of a psychological thriller, to explore a complex mosaic of emotional issues involving one imperfect person’s way of being.

That Gyllenhaal is able to do all this with the confidence of someone who has been directing movies for years is as mysterious as the identity of Elena Ferrante herself.

An edited version of this review was broadcast previously on Spokane Public Radio.