maggie gyllenhaal

One great blessing of the current trend toward diversity and inclusion is that Netflix green-lit this scathingly honest psychological exploration of the ambivalence of motherhood, trusting actress Maggie Gyllenhaal to make her auspicious directing debut unraveling its psychological complexity.

Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal has given many fine performances, including Secretary, The Kindergarten Teacher, and the daring television series The Deuce for which she produced twenty-five episodes. Now as director of her first film, The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal advances her resume with a courageous, provocative immersion into the psyche of Leda, a middle-aged English professor on a writing holiday in Greece.

There is a reason why British actress Olivia Colman, at the age of 47, is hitting her prime right now. Ever since she won an Best Actress Oscar for her role as England’s forlornly ditzy and rabbit-adoring Queen Anne in The Favourite, she’s become an English version of Meryl Streep. There seems to be nothing she can’t do. Whether it’s her unusual role as the daughter of a dementia sufferer played by the Anthony Hopkins in last year’s The Father, which led to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod or her Emmy-winning portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II on TV’s The Crown. Then there is her horridly demeaning godmother and eventual stepmother of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character on Fleabag, which earned Colman a supporting spot on the 2019 Emmy ballot.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s screenwriting and directorial feature debut elicits visceral feelings, some of them unpleasant. She would probably say that’s one of the points of her psychological drama, which she adapted from the novel by Elena Ferrante. The story centers on Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman, spectacular as always) who goes on a seaside vacation, only to become obsessed with young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her toddler-aged daughter. Her fascination with the two brings back memories of her own life as a stressed-out, overextended, and largely unhappy young mother (played in flashbacks by Jessie Buckley).

You cannot ignore Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stunning directorial debut. The Lost Daughter finds Leda (Olivia Colman), a middle-aged professor on holiday, reminiscing about the early years of motherhood. When a mother and young daughter down the beach catch her attention, she cannot help but live and relive vicariously through them. Based on the novel by Elena Ferrante and adapted for the screen by Gyllenhaal, this complex and brutal look at the maternal instinct will strike your rawest nerve.

On a solo holiday to a Greek Island, literature professor Leda (Olivia Colman) finds herself both fascinated and repelled by the brash extended family that shares her local beach, encroaching on her space and hijacking her attention. When a child from the family goes missing, it is Leda, level-headed in the crisis, who finds her. But this act invites unbidden memories of her own decisions as a mother, choices that she wrestles with even now, nearly 20 years later.