IMDb plot summary: A woman's beach vacation takes a dark turn when she begins to confront the troubles of her past.
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Starring Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, and Dakota Johnson.
The Lost Daughter stars Olivia Colman as a woman on vacation in Greece, where she forms a strange bond with a family vacationing in the same area. Her time there is intercut with flashbacks of her young adulthood with her two daughters. This is one of the slowest burns I've seen in a long time. At one point I said to my husband, "It's been thirty minutes and so far it's just people being on the beach near other people." It does build to a payoff, but it really leans into the slow unraveling of the facts. Colman is incredibly restrained and subtle for the majority of this, making her character extremely enigmatic. This is Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut, and while I can see where she was going with it, it mostly doesn't work for me. Not just because it's slow, but because that enigmatic restraint feels too often like it's going nowhere, and I'm not convinced that the ending ties it together in a *coherent* way, although it is mildly interesting. I like the attention Gyllenhaal pays to her central character; I just wish I was more drawn in by her story.
How it entered my Flickchart:
The Lost Daughter < Frank
The Lost Daughter > Madeline
The Lost Daughter < The Switch
The Lost Daughter > Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Lost Daughter > Saturday Night Fever
The Lost Daughter > Teacher of the Year
The Lost Daughter < The Great McGinty
The Lost Daughter > Double Jeopardy
The Lost Daughter > Nowhere Boy
The Lost Daughter < Wes Craven's New Nightmare
The Lost Daughter > Buffalo Soldiers
Final spot: #2279 out of 3593, or 37%.
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