The Lost Daughter  ★★★

MY first trip to the cinema for 2022 was The Lost Daughter on New Year’s Day.

By the end of this psychological drama I was feeling a little lost myself.

It’s an all-female affair, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on a novel by Elena Ferrante and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley in the main roles.

All three actresses are very good and Gyllenhaal shows enough to suggest she knows her way around a camera.

But the issue is with the script which is sometimes too obtuse for its own good.

While the themes are clear there are many aspects of plot and character motivations that are obviously meant to relate but the translation from book to film loses a little.

Having said the main performances are all good, none of the characters are likeable or easily relatable.

I’m sure that’s the point, but their complexity is not aided by a script that tends to scratch around the surface when it thinks it’s delving deep.

Colman plays a prickly college professor, Leda Caruso, who rents an apartment in a small harbour village in Greece. She is there to write a paper in relative peace and quiet.

But the atmosphere is altered when a loud, extended American family arrive for their yearly vacation.

A minor incident causes Leda and the family’s mother to get off on the wrong foot.

At the same time Leda seems to show an unusually strong interest in one of the adult women, Nina (Johnson), and her young daughter.

The daughter’s sudden disappearance is the catalyst for a series of actions and events that are also given context by flashbacks to Leda’s own struggles as a young mother, in which she is played by Buckley.

Unfortunately too many of the threads still don’t knit successfully and the film winds down to a bit of an anti-climax.

There are two supporting male parts. Peter Sarsgaard plays a literary professor who guides Leda in her early professional and personal life.

His part is ok but the great Ed Harris is wasted in a role that is meant to be important but doesn’t go anywhere at all and is symptomatic of the problematic journey from page to screen.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked much of the film and the first half quite a bit.

But in the end it felt like too much was being left for the audience to connect.