"The Lost Daughter:" The Danger of False Advertising

Maggie Gyllenhaal scratches the surface, but a drama this assured needs to do more than that.

May 30, 2022

Few films have ever gotten marketed as oddly as The Lost Daughter. Its trailer hints at a cool-colored indie thriller about a woman obsessed with a young child. It is a choppy three minutes of ominous music and unease. Everyone shoots glances, either puzzled or pained, with a few pointed sneers in the mix. Encounters seem eerie; the feeling of getting watched is prevalent. It gets sprinkled with those infamous critical exclamations that seem well-written at first glance but prove meaningless when you pick them apart.

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It is not “daring,” a ridiculous adjective to attach to any film, especially one that doesn’t contest conventional ideas of moral or ethical acceptability. It is not “haunting,” the word every film critic should have expelled from their vocabulary, considering that no one (except maybe war veterans or Holocaust survivors) has ever watched a movie and suffered prolonged anguish or torment. It is not “shiveringly intimate,” whatever the hell that even means. It is a movie, and those who reach for descriptors to pontificate about its supposed greatness prove, by the nature of that reaching, it is as empty as their claims.

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It does beg that age-old question, the one we ask whenever a film fails to meet expectations as we got inundated with the trailers that compelled us to it in the first place: is a movie responsible for its marketing?

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The Lost Daughter details Leda Caruso’s troubled vacation to Greece. A girl’s doll goes missing, and then stuff happens. That is all.

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In fairness, the movie is at its best when it is willing to commit to something, whatever it may be. It doesn’t shy away from dirty talk during a sexual encounter, going for the proverbial jugular with its profanity instead of restraining itself to be more palatable. It nails the experience of traveling solo, where people offer company for which your solitude definitively projects contempt, and accommodating others becomes a choice and not an unofficial rule. It knows the awkwardness of believing you recognize someone, only to flee with the realization you called out to a stranger.

When these human moments occur, the movie does not rely on Olivia Colman to draw us into Leda. It hints at the film it wants to be: the story of a woman fleeing from her past without realizing it and getting forced to accept how little ground she has made in the face of seeing everything she gave away. We know this because the movie makes it plain. We must settle for guessing at the rest because it does not understand anything other than the most simple ideas, and if it had accepted itself for what it is, it could have excelled.

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But it wants to say more than it does, and thus we get a plethora of threads weaving their way through the movie but receiving no follow-through. We get lured by the minute details that hint at future dividends but prove meaningful only to those actively seeking meaning. The movie pronounces rotten fruit to parallel the snake-like slices Leda prepared for her daughters; in this new world, what once meant everything is spoiled.

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The meaning of that is just the fact it exists. An idea cannot thrive on its own; a movie must have the conviction to say something, but The Lost Daughter wants to have it both ways. It aspires to be a contemplative drama but relies on us to do its thinking. Without any self-belief or aim, a bug on a pillow or wounds from a pinecone mean nothing.

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It wants to be as vague as possible in addressing anything so our interpretations can give it life, but in that sense, movies are much like life. Conversations require people to offer something of substance. Dialogues get built upon back and forth, ping-ponging developments that eventually reach resolutions. Not every result breaks ground or opens eyes, but they show that we progress with effort and merit. Thus, leaving things open to interpretation is admitting you have nothing to say.

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It is a damning flaw the more the film leans into those unresolved threads, hinting at many things to create drama it cannot find in the primary story. Every time it suggests impending danger, the ill intentions of a sinister family, it wants to bat around conflicting genres to create the abstractions it needs to seem more substantial than it is. The Lost Daughter only floats the many concepts that have driven Leda to this holiday in Greece. It knows she has built her happiness on the back of other people’s pain, and having learned the grass is greener, she aches for the memory of what life could have been. In these moments, whether in marketplace conversations with a young mother with whom she empathizes or looking for a young girl the way she searched for her child years before, the movie has found a way to earn our investment. Leda is a woman seeking avoidance who gets forced to confront the past she flees from in the very escape she built. The movie has shown us what it could have been. In doing so, its attempt to distract us from its aimlessness is plain. The many ideas it asks us to develop on its behalf become frustrations.

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In Leda’s guilt over abandoning her family, we can project a critique of societal expectation, but it is primarily a projection. The Lost Daughter wants to hint, but commentary does not make implications. It is so intent on non-commitment that it cannot convince us Leda has anything from which to run. If the belief is that women face scorn for decisions men get absolved from, it must convince us of this. It must show that Leda's husband would have received understanding where she suffered backlash. The idea is not as clear and is too dependent on external factors to resonate by itself.

Instead, the film makes her an adulterer who abandons her family for fleeting reasons. If it wants to rattle Leda as she sees that same young mother she counseled in the marketplace put herself in the same position she placed herself in years before, it must do more than rely on a quality performance to make its points matter. If it wants to say that having shut off does not mean one cannot turn back on and that sometimes what we think irredeemable can get repaired with a simple phone call, it does not. It just makes the phone call. It is better than nothing, but serving a dish does not mean you know how to cook it.

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The Lost Daughter is a movie for those that cannot visualize their ideals. In films, they find a means to a self-satisfying end. The less self-assured a movie is, the more it zigs-zags around a linear narrative or thematic progression, the more it appeals to their egotism. It can toss in an all-white outfit for its wounded protagonist to make us question if what we see is the afterlife, but without contextualizing what that would mean for her, it is just a detail to notice and then detest all for which it stands. A mish-mash of choices grants us the power of invention, so the movie thrives on our creations.

In the face of reality, The Lost Daughter is nothing more than a trivial domestic drama that dances around every opportunity to expand on its themes because a first-time screenwriter bit off more than she could chew. It withholds answers because it has none and banks on our collective belief that great filmmaking does not answer the questions it whispers into the Greek tide. Films like The Lost Daughter must make every moment count. No syllable can get wasted, and everything must connect. It is not a matter of avoiding challenging the audience; it is about making yourself credible by showing devotion to the ideas you wish to develop and evading the cliches that make movies more for people with little to say than those interested in what you have to say.

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In the abstract, no movie is responsible for its marketing, but The Lost Daughter’s emptiness is the mother of that marketing. As such, the contrast between what we got promised and what we got presented reflects upon it. It has all the trappings of a great movie: an Oscar-winning actress, a gorgeous setting chilled by icy cinematography, and a steady hand behind the lens, captaining the ship. Unfortunately, it does so over choppy waters. The Lost Daughter is a film you want to like, but it does not mean you must adhere to that desire. It is okay to acknowledge when something promising fails to fulfill that promise. It is okay for The Lost Daughter to have come up short. It is okay for a movie to be responsible for its marketing.