'The Lost Daughter' on Netflix... Does anyone understand it? (*Spoilers)

[NinaDefoe]

Just finished it and I haven't got a clue what just happened!

What was the point of Paul Mescall's character?
What happened to her husband?
What happened to her daughter?
Was she talking to both daughters on the phone at the end?
What was the point of the 'gangster family'?
Why did she steal the doll?
Did she die at the beach?
What was the relevance of the female hiker she kept hugging?

So many questions.
Did anyone actually understand it? I don't think I could bear to watch it again.

Is the doll another 'lost daughter" of the title, the little girl has lost her own toy 'daughter'. Leda observes how the girl and her family search desperately for the missing doll/ daughter. Was she thinking about how she responded to (by choice) losing her own daughters, or how her daughters may have responded to unexpectedly losing her?

She also seems to want Nina to have an affair with Will. She doesn't want to interrupt them when she stumbles across them kissing, and she decides to keep the doll when she finds out about their affair. Maybe she perceives Nina will be drawn to Will to escape from the stress of her daughter crying. She only returns the doll when Nina has taken her apartment key to continue the affair and been told that the difficulties never go away. She seems to want Nina to follow in her own footsteps, having an affair to as a kind of separation from motherhood.

Nina seems to see Leda in a kind of motherly role, helping her with her hat and giving her advice. Nina rejects the keys and Leda herself when she finds out the truth about the doll.

Take 2 - watching very slowly.

Can anyone explain this?
Everyone is searching for Elena the little girl in the film, on the beach.
The shot then changes to young Leda and one of her daughters Martha shouting for Bianca her other daughter. Also on the beach.

Then, for a split second it shows a person lying in the pebbles - I had to pause it to see but it looks like old Leda.

Did Leda lose Bianca on the beach and die herself on the beach?

I also think that When Callie asked Leda about her back, Nina looked uncomfortable.
Did she throw something at Leda?

When Nina told Leda about the lost doll, Leda didn’t flinch but Nina looked around her as if she knew Leda had it.

It gets stranger and stranger.

Is she wearing the same clothes as when she is lying on the beach at the end? Is it a flash forward to the end?

Or is she hallucinating/ unconscious on the beach at the end and the whole story of the holiday in Greece her imagination?

@HopelesslydevotedtoGu

Is she wearing the same clothes as when she is lying on the beach at the end? Is it a flash forward to the end?

Or is she hallucinating/ unconscious on the beach at the end and the whole story of the holiday in Greece her imagination?

Yes, white shirt/top/jacket

It’s possible she is hallucinating. I thought she woke up in the morning wet, in the beach after a failed suicide attempt.
She says on the phone to her daughters ‘I am alive actually’ when one of them says ‘I thought you were dead’.

BUT, then she starts to peel an orange - so it can’t be real! 😅

I think it’s all’s out what society does to women. That society is cruel to women. Expects them to be silent and accommodating saintly mothers. Not be desiring of their own wishes and wants. Society is essentially cruel to mothers. All the men expect women to be of service to them and they behave how they want regardless - even the academic is professionally jealous and the lover doesn’t like hearing her talking to her children on the phone. Women are ‘tortured’ and internalise that, especially when they become mothers. And this also turns women against each other. And disconnects them from each other.

@Ionlydomassiveones

“If I were to go on holiday on my own (I am a frumpy middle aged woman like the Olivia Coleman character) I would be invisible.”

Totally!

Maybe not if you refused to move for the 'bad' family.

"So while the book may have been set on an Italian island with a mafia family meeting Leda, I think the family in the film was Greek. "

I thought they were Greek Americans until I read this thread. I just thought that because it was set in Greece and I presumed they had property there inherited from ancestors.

@NinaDefoe

The point/symbolism of the pine cone is the only point I’m struggling with. Any ideas anybody? Or do we think she was attacked? Yes, I think she was attacked.

I really don't think so.

"Good points about beardy professor judging her, and that she probably worked at Harvard. I hadn't picked up on either of those things."

Me neither. I thought she lived in the Boston that's always on Question Time.

@NinaDefoe

Take 2 - watching very slowly.

Can anyone explain this?
Everyone is searching for Elena the little girl in the film, on the beach.
The shot then changes to young Leda and one of her daughters Martha shouting for Bianca her other daughter. Also on the beach.

Then, for a split second it shows a person lying in the pebbles - I had to pause it to see but it looks like old Leda.

Did Leda lose Bianca on the beach and die herself on the beach?

Maggie Gyllenhaall explains this in a video on youtube:

Oh my, that video is everything.

Wow Gwenhwyfar Thank you so much for that link! Brilliant!

I hope Leda isn’t dead.

Pigsick of interesting woman = corpse media trope.

I love the way Maggie and Dakota speak
With each other.

I read the doll thing thus:

Leda had a similar doll as a child which she gave to her daughters who ruined it (we see this in a flashback). So she is reclaiming the doll when she takes it from the girl in Greece. She is triggered and then stuck in her past. She is also massively passive aggressive.

I have a question. When lyle and leda are in her apartment talking/drinking/eating octopus, Lyle is telling her about his daughters and the things he used to do for them growing up (sending oysters iirc). Leda then apologises to him saying "I'm sorry that was mean of me". What had she actually said that was mean?

@TheBlueBear88 she says something about him being a good father or something... it's indirect about him not/ being there as they grew up. He says he taught them how to swim defensively, with some sadness. Recognising that he wasn't really there for them a great deal. She knows full well what she said which is why she apologizes.

Thanks very much for the reply @Mumteedum. I didn't understand much of the film, but for some reason that bit in particular annoyed me for failing to grasp the subtext!

No worries...I can't remember exactly what she says but she is being provocative and a bit snide as she admits. There is a LOT of subtext.

I’ve just watched it tonight. Had to come straight onto MN to find out what happened.

I was absolutely convinced she died at the end. The happy chatty phone call seemed like a dream or her waking up in heaven or something because she didn’t have happy chatty conversations with her kids, e.g near the beginning one of them calls and it’s all quite short and the daughter just wants to know something (was it something about a recipe?) and then hangs up just as OC is trying to tell her she’s on holiday.

Plus the orange appearing from nowhere. The thing the daughters used to like. I’m sure it wasn’t real and she died after being stabbed.

Not sure what I thought of the rest of it yet. Bit odd on the whole.

I think she died too and it was a “go into the light” moment where, briefly, she was the person who she wished she could be - a doting mother, whose girls were excited when she came in the phone.

Such an excellent movie, I’m still reeling!

YY, @AsYouWishButtercup

"What do people make of the fact that Leda definitely thinks the pregnant woman already has children?? In the scene in the shop?"

I think she thinks the older pregnant woman is actually the biological mother of young woman's daughter-as in if you could farm out your kids to be raised by someone else, well Leda would have if she could have...and it may be that this is the case so this mafia woman has been able to evade motherhood that first time...maybe now having a baby with a new partner, unencumbered with a child from a previous relationship...

@CarolynMartens

I do think it’s interesting that it’s provoked such a strong reaction in that review upthread. We very rarely see unrepentant, unapologetic women on screen, particularly not middle-aged ones. And middle-aged white women are seen as fair targets these days. Though also wanting to see more from the man you find interesting, when he’s done pretty much the same thing as the main female character, is quite revealing imo.

Totally agree. Also not particularly impressed with all the “Leda was mentally ill” comments on here (or possibly other threads on MN about this film). She wasn’t mentally ill. Both the director and the writer of the book have confirmed this. Leda was simply human.