What's in the Box

There’s a scene very early on in The Lost Daughter where Olivia Coleman’s Leda goes to pick from an appetising-looking bowl of fruit, only to find that it has all gone rotten. To some extent, this moment is symptomatic of the holiday that she is embarking on, whereby something that appears idyllic and aesthetically pleasing actually ends up manifesting itself as deeply unpleasant under the surface.

In her directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal wholeheartedly leans into the uncomfortable nature of the film’s subject matter regarding parenting, memory and loss. Leda is an academic approaching the wrong side of middle age who arrives at a Greek island under the guise of a “working holiday”. At first, she seems to embrace her state of meditative solitude; whether it’s relaxedly making notes on the beach, eating ice cream or lolling about in the sea. But an incident involving a momentarily lost child triggers a series of flashbacks depicting Leda as a young mother (excellently played by Jessie Buckley), and the film continues to amalgamate these temporal periods to illustrate how Leda feels consistently haunted by the ghosts of her parenting past.

For the most part, Gyllenhaal crafts a tender yet piercingly affecting drama about the trials and tribulations of parenting. It makes for deeply difficult viewing at times, particularly the occasions where flashbacks of young Leda’s struggles are directly intercut with her present-day self wistfully in thought. This narrative technique puts significant weight on the two central performances; fortunately Coleman and Buckley are both magnificent in understanding the nuances of Leda’s generational shifts and how an innate aspect of someone’s sensibility can remain. Notwithstanding the slightly indulgent episode where Peter Sarsgaard briefly appears as a hero-worship figure, the film retains strong control on its central thread. It incorporates a humility, and more importantly, fallibility to parenting that truly reinforces its own notion of children as a “crushing responsibility”.