The Lost Daughter review: Will make you stop and reassess everything you thought about motherhood.

What: The Lost Daughter review: This Netflix movie will make you stop and reassess everything you thought about motherhood.

The Lost Daughter review

Maggie Gyllenhaal chooses to direct the cinematic version of Elena Ferrante’s novella by the same name as her debut film. With Olivia Colman playing the lead, the film becomes that much more like a beached shark that is struggling to survive right in front of you on a lonely beach.

You want to save it because you respect creatures, but you are afraid to touch it to push it back into the water because you know, it’s a shark. And there’s no one who can help you.

'Mere paas maa hai!' is the triumphant dialog of heroes of all Indian films. We put motherhood above all else in this country and automatically assume that the mothering instinct will kick in the moment a woman becomes a mother. And Indians are the first to make horrible comments on couples who choose to not have babies. If a couple is having marital problems, the first thing the elderly women in the family will advise is: ‘Have a child and everything will be okay’. But what happens if the woman just cannot be the perfect ‘maa’?

Olivia Colman is a multi-award-winning actor who is so good, you cannot take your eyes off the screen even though your heart says that you need to stop the film and take a breather. The camera is relentlessly focussed on her, and she emotes everything brilliantly.

Leda is a professor and translator taking a solo beach holiday, renting an apartment and ready to spend some quiet time reading and writing and swimming. But her holiday quiet is broken by a big noisy family that makes it impossible for Leda to get any reading done. So, she does the next best thing. She watches them. She is particularly taken by a young woman (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter and is overcome when sudden memories of her own past hit her.

‘I’m an unnatural mother,’ Leda confesses and the mind-blowing flashbacks show us why. An ambitious young woman who is distracted by the attention of a famous scholar who pays attention to her, young Leda leaves her adoring, clingy daughters with her husband who implores her to come back. You and I have seen the opposite in perhaps every Hindi movie, with songs like, ‘Na jaao saiyyan,’ (from the film Saheb, Bibi Aur Ghulam) being the ultimate plea for a spouse to not leave. To see a man, beg his wife to not leave is a scene that makes you pause the film and get yourself the strongest coffee you have. The film does not tell us why Leda is like how she is except that she tells us that her childhood home and her own mother was ‘shit’...

A young Leda is played brilliantly by Jessie Buckley (you saw her in ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ on Netflix) and you just don’t understand why it is so easy for her to leave. That’s years of patriarchy that has moulded your thinking, dear reader, that a woman has to stay back and look after home and hearth. The film does not moralise at all. And that’s why this film is such a difficult watch.

You don’t know initially why Leda is so awkward in all her social responses. When Lyle, the guy who manages all the apartments (Ed Harris, still so handsome!) asks her if she wants a drink, she says no, when the large family asks her if she could shift her chair on the beach, she says no, and yet you don’t hate her. You wonder what prompts her to do the things she does and you are taken aback by her totally awkward and weird responses to simple things.

When Callie (the pregnant woman who is part of the large family on the beach) tells Leda that she’s going to have a daughter, Leda’s reply is stunning: Daughters are a crushing responsibility.