This is how we meet the film’s deeply complex protagonist.

She collapses, alone where the sea meets the shore. We don’t know what has driven her to this point, or what she might be searching for, if anything. The Lost Daughter begins near the end of its chronology, as we see Olivia Colman’s Leda stumbling down a dark beach, blood leaking from her stomach to stain her white dress. The Lost Daughter suggests that, for many women, motherhood itself is the tragedy. When it comes to stories about parents and lost children, we are culturally conditioned to expect tragedy and, in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, we get it, but in a far more simultaneously complex and mundane way. Even Leda’s mysterious stomach wound, which we see in the opening minutes of the film before flashing back, has an unexpected explanation. Flashbacks hint that Bianca, the younger of protagonist Leda’s two daughters, may have gone missing during a day at the beach too, but we eventually discover that was not the case at all. There is no tragedy in the traditional sense: Nina’s three-year-old, Elena, goes missing, but she is quickly found. The Lost Daughter, however, subverts these genre expectations. When it comes to movies with similar story elements to The Lost Daughter, we are conditioned to expect a specific kind of immense, external tragedy- namely, that a child is lost through abduction or death and the parent must grieve and endure. You can read our spoiler-free review of the Netflix film here. This The Lost Daughter article contains major spoilers for the ending.

The lost symbol synopsis