The Lost Daughter

We watched The Lost Daughter on Netflix. It’s fabulous. High recommend. (By “we,” I mean my wife and I.)

If you only like comic book movies, then it’s a triple–high–recommend, and I hope you hate every moment of it.

This isn’t a movie review site, and I don’t have the time or energy to give any other thoughts except that I loved it. It’s beautifully made and acted.

It’s about motherhood. This article will explain it.

Obviously I am not a mother, but I do have twin girls around the age of the daughters depicted in the film, so I understand something of the parental experience.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is a terrific director. For some reason I thought she was already a director. Then I remembered it’s because of the character she played in The Deuce, a prostitute who becomes a porn actor, then a porn director, then an art-film director (a composite of some real-life people).

But however she came to it, her sense of taste and performance is just spot-on.

Also, the score is great! It’s by Dickon Hinchcliff, of the band Tindersticks, who scored Winter’s Bone, Locke and quite a number of other things, mostly in the U.K.

His opening cue, “Leda,” was so striking I assumed it had to be a needle-drop. (It sounds like a vintage R&B groove, imparting so much soul to the protagonist and the film.) I used Shazam to I.D. it as the score!

Bravo to everybody involved.

UPDATE: Now I know what the theme reminded me of—“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” by James Brown. Thematically very appropriate!