The Lost Daughter, MA15+, 122 minutes. 4 stars
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Among the blockbusters being released now, The Lost Daughter stands out as a refreshing alternative.
Actor Maggie Gyllenhaal's impressive debut as writer and director, adapting Elena Ferrante's novel, is a low-key, character-driven movie. It's not for the thrill-seeker or the impatient, but if you appreciate good acting and don't mind an intimate scale, a leisurely pace and not having everything spelled out explicitly, it's rewarding.
Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), a professor of comparative literature in the United States, has taken a working holiday on a Greek island.
It doesn't look too promising at first.
Her room is far from luxurious or even welcoming - the fruit in the bowl is mouldy, there's no screen or curtain on the window so bugs can and do get in and the light and sound of a lighthouse is an ongoing source of annoyance.
Additionally, the building manager, Lyle (Ed Harris), it becomes all too obviously clear, has taken a more than professional interest in her.
But she copes with it all: she just wants to be alone to read, write and relax.
When a few generations of a large Italian-American family turn up on the beach where Leda is enjoying some quiet time, it looks as though we're in for a culture clash between the reserved, somewhat passive-aggressive British woman and the more brash, blunt New Yorkers.
But while there's some of that throughout - and various members of the family react to her in different ways - there's more going on, both with them and in Leda's mind, than initially meets the eye.
When the young daughter of Nina (Dakota Johnson), one of the Americans, goes missing, Leda joins in the search and finds the girl as well as, separately, her doll.
But while Leda quickly returns the child to Nina, she keeps the doll in her room, even though the little girl is very upset to be without it. Why Leda continues this rather perverse act of cruelty becomes clearer as the story unfolds.
Colman, who won a well-deserved Oscar for The Favorite, is superb here. A lot of the story is told in silences, and Colman's face expresses a wide range of emotions in reaction to people and events and memories as well as keeping some things guarded.
In the flashbacks, Jessie Buckley is excellent as Leda a couple of decades earlier as well as a good visual match for Colman.
They help us understand what has made Leda the sometimes sympathetic, sometimes irascible woman she is, and neither actress dodges the responsibility of playing the complexities of the character.
We see the young Leda struggling to work to get ahead in academia, no easy task.
All the while she has to mother her two young children - who pose frequent and ongoing challenges, as kids do - and deal with her nice but not terribly helpful husband Joe (Jack Farthing).
There's an all-too-real sense that Leda regrets and maybe never really wanted or was suited to marriage and motherhood, from her tart words of advice - or warning - to one of the American women who's expecting a baby to her apparent estrangement from her now-grown daughters.
But she also desires connection, as we see both in her past with a fellow academic (Peter Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal's husband) and in her present. How much of this is simply carnal pleasure-seeking and how much is trying to meet a genuine emotional need is debatable.
Leda seems to be someone who wants to live a life of the mind and who values solitude but can't escape complicated feelings of guilt and pain, which that doll she keeps hold of so obdurately represents as she tries to work through her memories and feelings.
The film doesn't look like a touristy picture-postcard view of Greece: the settings and cinematography are, aptly, not glamorous.
The film ultimately feels a bit long for its material, and the ending is a little muted. But its worthwhile elements are greater than its weaknesses.
The Lost Daughter is worth seeking out as a serious adult film among the animation, superheroes and other less subtle offerings.