The Lost Daughter

Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

Running time: 2hr1 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

The Lost Daughter starring Olivia Colman

This review originally ran at the Venice Film Festival

People, watching people. It’s at the heart of so much culture. My favourite bits in Jackass aren’t exactly the stunts — it’s the guys reacting to whichever one of them is doing the stunt; chop that out and the whole endeavour would be joyless. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin, famously, shows us the audience reacting to a film that we only hear. Gogglebox, Channel 4’s wildly successful television review show, has a similar premise at its heart. People, watching people. We love to see it.

The Lost Daughter has at its heart one of the most interesting actors currently working. Nobody people-watches like Olivia Colman. Obviously she’s no slouch when comes to the rest of her performance, either, but where The Lost Daughter edges into the exceptional for me is in the precision with which the camera frames up and studies a secondary character or scene before giving us Colman, watching them. I guess this is nothing so radical, as a filmmaking strategy, but the list of boring films that fail to truly take us inside a character while attempting this technique is endless.

Give me Colman watching a large, brash, extended family invade her personal holiday beach retreat. Give me Colman watching Dakota Johnson’s long-limbed trophy wife, her ass hanging out of her swimsuit, having a fight with her possibly crooked husband. Give me Colman watching Ed Harris’ ageing loner dancing dorkily at a village disco. Leda, the character that Colman and writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal have created (based on an Elena Ferrante novel) feels as real and sympathetic to me as some actual people that I’ve known many years.

But the most intimate people-watching we do happens inside our own heads, as we go back over our own memories —  revelling in them, rewriting them, torturing ourselves, scrutinising ourselves, and trying to figure out who we once were. In The Lost Daughter, Leda’s younger self is played by Jessie Buckley, and these scenes are expertly intercut with the present day, so that we intuitively understand them not as expositional inserts for the audience’s benefit, but as a reflection of the present-day character’s interior mental landscape. Buckley judges this perfectly: she is playing a memory, so it isn’t about performing in order to be liked by a cinema audience — she must embody Leda’s self-justifying, self-lacerating recollection of herself, and she does this with a casually brutal fearlessness.

The actor-turned-director path is often a rocky one; with The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal bucks the trend in a big way. Perhaps because she is herself so used to watching, and being watched.

THE LOST DAUGHTER (2021) Written by Maggie Gyllenhaal | Shot by Hélène Louvart | Edited by Affonso Gonçalves

In cinemas now.