« The Lost Daughter », sur Netflix : un troublant mal de mère (2024)

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Is The Lost Daughter a psychological thriller? ›

The Lost Daughter is a 2021 psychological drama film written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal (in her feature directorial debut), based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, based on a novel by Elena Ferrante, examines a common resolve and a peculiar guilt – both related to each other – the desire to live on one's own terms, the struggle to live for someone else.

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A college professor confronts her unsettling past after meeting a woman and her young daughter while on vacation in Italy. Her obsession with the woman and her daughter prompts memories of her early motherhood.

The Lost Daughter / Film synopsis

The acting is phenomenal, especially from Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, and it does an excellent job of getting the audience to understand the stress of parenthood. However, the film tried to build up so much tension that never reached its breaking point.

Through the sympathetic eyes of Leda, Nina is shown struggling with the constant demands of her young daughter, which she is left by her husband to bear alone, and will eventually admit to having “depression, or something”.

The novel ends with Leda saying, “I'm dead, but I'm fine,” a painful, philosophically complex and ontologically reflective statement that fits both Ferrante's voice as well as Leda's. However, it is precisely when Gyllenhaal's Leda says, “I'm alive,” that the film's end divorces from Ferrante's text.

Leda then confesses to stealing the doll and explains it away as her "playing", prompting Nina to react furiously and stab Leda in her abdomen with the hatpin that Leda bought her earlier.

But underneath, Leda suffers from anxiety. She gets dizzy spells whenever she remembers what she gave up to get to where she is.

Leda has mental health struggles and the film is told from her unreliable perspective. The giveaway here is how she places the doll one place but it magically ends up somewhere else. Leda is still dealing with post partem and it never went away.

Why is it called The Lost Daughter? ›

That's because when Leda encounters Nina in Greece, she quickly realizes that Nina is her very own (lost) daughter. Our first signal is that Leda refuses to move her beach chair; she refuses because she wants to stay nearby and get a closer look at Nina.

The Lost Daughter (2021) - Robyn Elwell as Bianca - IMDb.

This scene's reveal—that Leda abandoned her young children for years, initially to pursue an affair—arrives much earlier in the book, more as dramatic setup. Gyllenhaal realized that to preserve the tension of her film, she needed to hold it as long as possible.

The film centers the drama of Leda's current, encumbered solitude on the stresses of her life as a young mother and her leap into independence by separating herself from her children.

The book was well received by the critics. A main theme pointed out is that of what Leda calls "unnatural mothers", meaning on how she breaks "some of the sacred taboos of motherhood by putting her needs and ambitions before those of her daughters".

Psychological thriller is a genre combining the thriller and psychological fiction genres. It is commonly used to describe literature or films that deal with psychological narratives in a thriller or thrilling setting.

Gyllenhaal has said that she made The Lost Daughter from horror blueprints, and her flourish in this scene seems to indicate the subgenre from which she borrowed most heavily. Horror films of the Creepy Doll variety can be difficult to regard as anything other than camp.

When the daughter of the family goes missing, Leda is forced to remember the traumas of her own childhood and her time as a young mother. The directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter is an exploration of the difficulties of motherhood and the dangers of leaving one's past unsettled.

Elena's missing doll, Nani, is the central symbol of The Lost Daughter. To Leda, the doll is “the shining testimony of perfect motherhood” (62): It symbolizes the bond between Nina and Elena, a bond that seems so different from Leda's troubled relationships with both her mother and her daughters.