The fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal would be one of the key players of the 2022 awards season became obvious after the world premiere of The Lost Daughter at the 78^th Venice Film Festival, where Gyllenhaal won the Golden Osella Award for Best Screenplay for the psychological drama which she both wrote and directed. Her feature directorial debut also brought Gyllenhaal, who is already a Golden Globe-winning actress, her first Golden Globe nomination for Best Director, along with numerous other accolades for Best Directing and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Though The Lost Daughter is based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante, one of the most highly praised best-selling authors in modern literature, it could be hardly defined as a verbatim film adaptation: Maggie Gyllenhaal allows herself to take several steps away from the source material, including setting the story in Greece instead of Italy.

The Lost Daughter stars Golden Globe winners Olivia Colman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ed Harris, along with Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal.

Leda Caruso, played by Olivia Colman, is a middle-aged college professor who is spending a vacation in Greece. One day she meets Nina (Dakota Johnson), a young mother who comes to the same beach as Leda with her three-year-old daughter Elena and the rest of her family. While observing this group of people, Leda plunges into her past and experiences a previously forgotten depth of maternal guilt. A variety of flashbacks reveal that the young Leda (Jessie Buckley), a talented and promising theorist of linguistics and professor, was tortured by the pressures of new motherhood to her toddler daughters, Bianca and Martha: she even left her family for another man for several years.

The New York native Gyllenhaal, who will celebrate her forty-fifth birthday next year, is a Golden Globe-winning actress and a mother of two daughters with her husband Peter Sarsgaard, whom she directs in The Lost Daughter for the second time in her career, the first being the 2020 Italian TV series Homemade. Obviously, she has first-hand knowledge of the work/family balance challenge facing any young mother who chooses to pursue her career. With the help of the French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, Gyllenhaal chooses camera angles that keep us focused on the anguish in Leda’s mind, while Olivia Colman’s brilliant performance leaves no doubt that Leda has never forgiven herself. Her acquaintance with Nina and her daughter has triggered the deepest memories of her loss of identity after she became a mother that drove her into a depression that she could fight only by running away.

When speaking to Film Independent about The Lost Daughter in November 2021 at the Wallis Annenberg Center of Performing Arts, Maggie Gyllenhaal said: “I hope that women who never heard of Ferrante, who don’t live in that kind of world, who never would’ve picked a book like that up, who might be really struggling with the spectrum of feelings that they have being a woman in the world, a mother, a thinker, a lover, an artist, whatever, watches my film and feels like, ‘Oh, maybe these feelings are normal. Maybe other people have feelings like this.’”

The Lost Daughter doesn’t teach us what is right and what is wrong: both Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film and Elena Ferrante’s novel let each one of us decide by showing the depth of the internal drama behind the choices we are forced to make.