The Lost Daughter

    The Lost Daughter
    2021

    Synopsis

    A woman's seaside vacation takes a dark turn when her obsession with a young mother forces her to confront secrets from her past.

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    Cast

    • Olivia ColmanLeda Caruso
    • Jessie BuckleyYoung Leda Caruso
    • Dakota JohnsonNina
    • Ed HarrisLyle
    • Paul MescalWill
    • Peter SarsgaardProfessor Hardy
    • Dagmara DomińczykCallie
    • Jack FarthingJoe
    • Alba RohrwacherFemale Hiker
    • Oliver Jackson-CohenToni

    Recommendations

    • 100

      The Telegraph

      The sheer unsparing intimacy of Gyllenhaall’s film gives its thrills an excitingly illicit quality. Watching it feels like reading someone else’s diary – and then finding yourself mentioned in its pages.
    • 100

      The Playlist

      The Lost Daughter leaves you haunted, shaken, and crushingly scarred like only the best of films are capable of doing.
    • 91

      IndieWire

      Gyllenhaal’s film is a story of self-ascribed transgression and of shame buried and turned bitterly inward, and it too, is made with such alertness to the power of cinematic language – particularly that of performance – that even as you feel your stomach slowly drop at the implications of what you’re watching, you cannot break its spreading sinister spell.
    • 90

      The Hollywood Reporter

      The reclusive Italian author’s familiar themes of female relationships, sexuality, motherhood and women’s struggle to carve a professional space outside it are beautifully served in this uncompromising character study, illuminated by performances of jagged brilliance from Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as her younger self.
    • 90

      Screen Daily

      Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.
    • 90

      TheWrap

      The Lost Daughter is a masterwork in perception and all that society places upon mothers and motherhood.
    • 90

      Variety

      Through it all, Gyllenhaal assumes an unfussy, practically invisible non-style that conveys the essential (like that missing doll, visible in the background of a key scene) while privileging the performances.
    • 90

      Time

      To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.

    Seen by

    • MARTIN