While on holiday in Greece, middle-aged university professor and noted translator, Leda Caruso, meets Nina, a young mother, after Nina's three-year-old daughter Elena goes momentarily missing on the beach. Leda finds Elena and returns her to Nina, who expresses her growing exhaustion and unhappiness. Elena is upset after she loses her favorite doll, which Leda has secretly taken. In flashbacks, it's 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struggled with being a young mother to her two daughters, Bianca and Martha, often losing her patience and becoming withdrawn from her family.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, who sees that she has the 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, and Nina explains 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 for three years after she became too overwhelmed, leaving them with her now ex-husband, during which time she had an affair with a fellow professor. She admits that 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 Will later asks Leda if they can borrow her apartment to have sex.
The next day when Nina arrives at Leda's to get the apartment keys, Leda admits to being a selfish and "unnatural" mother and warns Nina that her depression will never go. Leda also gives her Elena's doll, confessing that she took it and that she was "just playing". Nina reacts angrily by stabbing Leda in the stomach with a hatpin before leaving. That night, Leda packs her bags and leaves the resort, but drives her car off the road due to her injuries; 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.
At its opening night world premiere, the movie received a four-minute standing ovation from Venice Film Festival attendees in the Sala Grande.[34]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 94% based on 232 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. 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."[35] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 86 out of 100, based on reviews from 51 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[36]
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."[37]
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.”[38]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.”[39]
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.”[40]
.jpg)
.jpg)
