To whom it may concern,
It seems that everyone has misunderstood the plot of the new Netflix movie The Lost Daughter. By everyone, I mean Roger Ebert, The New York Times, The Guardian, Vox, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and others who have summarized The Lost Daughter as simply a portrayal of the kinds of experiences mothers and daughters have with one another and the world. A character study.
Most reviews even deem the ending of the film to be ambiguous. They ask the questions: Is she dead or alive in the final scene? Is this just the fever dream of a regretful and eccentric mother?
Folks are rambling on and on about the significance of the names of the characters; they point to the fact that in Greek mythology Leda is the mother of Helen of Troy.
To be fair, the names assigned to characters in books and movies are almost always a relevant detail; and it seems likely that the link to the mythological story was made intentionally by the author of the original book The Lost Daughter.
But there’s another name we should be focusing on: Nina. It translates to ‘daughter.’ This is a story called The Lost Daughter, and there’s a central character whose name is literally ‘daughter.’ …
Spoilers ahead, obviously.
The key to unlocking this mystery is in a series of important flashbacks where we see that young Leda left her husband and their two daughters to be with Professor Hardy. But what we don’t see is what took place during the three years that she was away — and that is why the daughter is lost. Lost to us, as viewers and readers, anyway.
During those three years, she and Professor Hardy had a child together and named her Nina. But eventually Leda found herself again (or, still?) unsatisfied with her life, and so she decided to leave the Professor and Nina behind to go back to her old life with her other family. It makes sense that Leda might want to leave behind a memento for the daughter she was abandoning. It makes sense that she would buy a doll that looked just like the one she had as a child. (The one that we saw was shattered.)
Now, back to the beginning of the movie:
When Leda and Nina first meet, there’s no denying that they are drawn to each other in an intimate way right off the bat. Nina is doe-eyed and giving compliments and hanging on Leda’s every word. Leda is calm and wise; she eases into the role of being a source of stability and encouragement during the difficult ordeal of the, uhh, lost… daughter… (Elena).
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.
Later, Leda swipes the doll so she can get a closer look at it and confirms that it is indeed the doll she left with Nina many years ago. Throughout the movie, she is contemplating whether or not to tell Nina who she is — and restoring the doll to its former glory in an attempt to restore her lost daughter’s childhood.
In the end, Leda chooses not to tell Nina that they are mother and daughter. Instead, she just gives the doll back and says she was teasing. The hat-pin stab to the gut does not kill her. She may have thought she was going to die — she might’ve even wanted to die — but she doesn’t.
Leda has a fresh chance to start again, and she chooses to focus her attention on her two daughters, Bianca and Martha. Even though she used to “hate talking to them on the phone,” she takes to heart some good advice she heard along the way: that the most generous and pure gift we can give is our attention. Her life has been full of stress and change, guilt and regret. She’s had to make some tough decisions about her own needs vs the needs of others. By showering her daughters with her attention, she is finally embracing something that she hasn’t before: the joy of motherhood.
The male characters in the film are mostly unimportant. In fact, you could probably delete all of their scenes and still have the same story. The presence of the ‘mafia people’ is only a device that builds tension and distracts us from what is going on beneath the surface.
This story is so well-crafted that it has hidden the titular ‘lost daughter’ in plain sight. Leda is an unreliable narrator and has deliberately left out any memories of her lost daughter. As such, the daughter is truly lost; because we as readers and viewers are never shown the connection.
I hope you’ll give it another watch and test my interpretation. It’s a much better, deeper, more complicated story than most people think.
Thank you for reading,
Brooke Baron
