Film Review – The Lost Daughter

After spending years as a respected actress, Maggie Gyllenhaal takes the next step in her career, making her feature-length directorial debut with “The Lost Daughter.” She handles screenplay duties as well, adapting a 2006 Elena Ferrante novel about a middle-aged woman wrestling with dark thoughts and stinging memories while taking a vacation on a Greek island. It’s not a tale that’s built for comfort, and it’s not a thriller either. Gyllenhaal rolls up her sleeves and digs into the ugliness and exposure of a mental health crisis, using Ferrante’s plotting to generate a striking character study. Gyllenhaal gets a little tripped up while trying to compact the book into a movie, but her instincts with casting and emotional wreckage are spot-on, creating a disturbing picture that sneaks up on viewers, also painting an unnervingly realistic portrait of motherhood and all the sacrifices it demands. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com