“The Lost Daughter”, released in Dec. of 2021, is the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress best known for her roles in “Secretary” (2002) and “The Dark Knight” (2008). The film follows Leda, a middle-aged college professor vacationing alone in Greece. While there, she’s confronted with memories of her past as she interacts with Nina, a young mother she meets on the beach. The two characters, played by Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson respectively, form a largely unspoken connection through short conversations and lingering glances. They feel a kinship to each other, seeing the darkness they feel in themselves reflected in the other. 

At its core, this story is about motherhood. Typically, such stories are nurturing and fulfilling, but “The Lost Daughter” is anything but that. The whole movie has an underlying sense of despair and darkness. The camera caresses each scene with an unrelenting intimacy, as we witness these characters in their rawest forms, constantly acting out of self-interest. It is not a story about good people. 

We follow the character of Leda in two timelines: one in Greece in present day, and one at the beginning of her motherhood, at 23. The younger version of Leda is played by Jessie Buckley in a wonderful performance that captures Colman’s take on the character expertly. Leda was thrown into motherhood never wanting it in the first place. Her character has a strong sense of personal identity that is suffocated by her children. She loves her children because they are her own, but she continuously leaves them to follow her own path of a successful writing, and later, teaching career.

The biggest issue about this movie for me was pacing. We cut back and forth between the younger and older versions of Leda, simultaneously spending too much and  not enough time in her past. The moments spent in the past are usually critical character moments: Leda cheating on her husband, leaving her children, and then later, coming back. But the back and forth tends to take the viewer out of the otherwise extremely immersive story.

When we are with Leda in the present, she projects herself onto Nina, this young mother who seems to have a lot of the same feelings about motherhood that Leda herself had when she was that age. Nina is beautiful and young and stuck in a relationship with her daughter’s father, and she looks to Leda as a beacon of wisdom and experience. They find comfort in each other’s shared pain, but ultimately, their connection is broken by Leda  acting out of self-interest once again. The relationship between the two is the most compelling part of the story for me. They’re mirrors of each other, but Nina chooses to cut herself off from Leda, breaking the cycle that was beginning to form. 

Before I watched this movie, I had heard it was scary, so I expected horror. But the scariness in this movie doesn’t come from jump scares or gore, instead from the unrelenting sense of darkness as we watch these characters make bad choices again and again. “The Lost Daughter” is scary because it forces the viewer to confront all the terrifying, mean, gross aspects of ourselves that make up the human experience.