How Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter Captures the Unease of Ferrante’s Novel

In The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, originally published in 2006 and translated into English by Ann Goldstein in 2008, a 48-year-old woman steals a doll from a child. The woman, named Leda, is a college professor with two grown daughters who have gone to live with their father. Beyond the occasional phone call, Leda doesn’t have much contact with them, and she’s okay with that. She’s enjoying the freedom from her children with a beach vacation. But the slew of troubling memories that surface in her mind—and her hyperfixation on Nina, a young mother, and her daughter Elena, who she sees at the beach—suggest that she can’t quite put her years as a parent to rest.

Director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 adaptation of Ferrante’s novel doesn’t change much about the story. In the film, Leda (Olivia Colman) is British instead of Italian, the vacation takes place in a town in Greece instead of the coast of Italy, and Nina (Dakota Johnson) and Elena come from a family of New Yorkers. The cinematography conveys the eerie tone of the novel with a focus on the beautiful but strangely empty beach where the vacationers spend their days. Not much happens, but even the most mundane of moments feels significant. Gyllenhaal successfully evokes the uneasiness of the novel and the sense that there is something dark and hard to define beneath the surface of every interaction.

But what the film inevitably can’t do is replicate the intense inward narration of the book, which documents Leda’s spiraling thoughts as her observations of Nina and Elena bleed into memories of taking care of her own daughters when they were very young. Leda was not a happy mother; her daughters often irritated her to the point of anger, resulting in instances where she ended up, as she explains, going too far. One anecdote, which revolves around a doll from Leda’s childhood that she gifts to her eldest daughter Bianca, is particularly unnerving. At first excited to share an heirloom from her past, Leda is soon troubled by how little Bianca cares about the doll. The doll meets its end when Leda hurls it off the balcony, feeling what she describes as “a cruel joy.” All this is nested within Leda’s interactions with Elena’s doll, which she holds, dresses, and cares for as if it were a human child.

Most Popular

The film has other methods of developing interiority. For one, it has an excellent lead performance from Olivia Coleman, who makes even Leda’s most disturbing choices feel like the actions of a real person. But more important than Coleman’s performance is a careful employment of flashbacks. In the flashbacks a younger Leda is played by Jessie Buckley, who mirrors Coleman’s expressions and vocal patterns very well. The focal point of the flashbacks is Leda’s particular method of peeling fruit: in a circular motion, so that the peel comes off in one unbroken strand. Her daughters, fascinated with the habit, describe it as peeling the fruit like a snake. The chant “don’t let it break; peel it like a snake” recurs throughout, a sweet but slightly unnerving emblem of the relationship between a parent and her children. The idea of a single long, looping peel speaks to how the most difficult parts of such relationships spiral through families and generations. Leda recognizes aspects of herself and her children in Nina and Elena, and it’s through these connections that her darkest memories come to light.

Perhaps the most prominent adaptation of Ferrante’s work is the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend, a saga about a tumultuous friendship between two women who grew up on the outskirts of Naples in the back half of the twentieth century. My Brilliant Friend is thrilling television, one of the best TV shows of the past decade, but it also struggles to capture Ferrante’s complicated style of narration. The show uses voiceover to integrate some of the most essential passages of the novels into the show, a technique that is sometimes successful and sometimes overbearing. The Lost Daughter takes a smoother approach, allowing the connections between flashbacks and present action to speak for themselves while occasionally having Leda voice internal thoughts from the book as spoken dialogue.

What makes The Lost Daughter so disturbing is the question of whether Leda’s thoughts are those of a distinctly troubled person or if they’re thoughts that everyone has, buried somewhere deep. Some of her actions toward her daughters might be categorized as abuse, but they come from a human place—as a young woman in her early twenties, she felt stifled by the demands of motherhood and became resentful. A crucial fact of the film is how Leda left her family for a few years when her daughters were still young to have an affair with a college professor who praised her work. What the film glosses over is Leda’s ruminations on her past relationship with her mother, who would often threaten to abandon her. Like many parents, Leda was determined not to repeat the same harmful behavior with her own children. But she’s self-aware enough to recognize the obvious irony: in leaving her family she fulfilled the threat of abandonment that her own mother never carried out.

This is one example of a thematic throughline the film can only partially deliver on. There’s also an unnecessary framing device where Leda wanders up to the shoreline of a beach at night and collapses in the waves, which comes off as a misguided attempt to build intrigue. Really, this is a film with one integral plot point—the theft of the doll—and the most excruciating tension arises from Leda’s continuous refusal to give it back.

The film comes closest to the source material when it brings the novel’s visual details to life. Its portrayal of the “dark liquid” that emerges from the mouth of Elena’s doll, a mixture of seawater and muck from the beach, does right by the novel’s chilling descriptions. Even better is a scene toward the end, when Leda, prying the mouth open, uses tweezers to extract a writhing worm that the little girl must have hidden inside the doll’s body. The sight of the dark worm squirming on the bathroom floor as Leda watches in horror brings everything together—the flashbacks to Leda’s past, her theft of the doll, how the dynamic between Nina and Elena rekindles her own uneasy feelings about herself. One is reminded, once again, of the snake-like peel that never breaks.