Younger Leda is played by Jessie Buckley (so believable as the younger Colman), and younger Leda is frazzled, irritated, overwhelmed trying to balance her career ambitions with parenting two small clingy daughters. They run on a parallel track, creating a confusing melee of sensations and parallels, as well as filling in Leda's story. These scenes don't function as flashbacks.

These mysterious and tense present-day sequences are interspersed with scenes from Leda's life twenty years prior. The next day, though, she's drawn back in. Leda endures hostile glances from the entire family for the rest of the day, and everything is ruined so she flees the beach. There's a hugely pregnant matriarch named Callie ( Dagmara Dominczyk), who asks Leda if she wouldn't mind switching to another beach chair so the whole family can sit together. There's something way too intense in Leda's focus on this mother-daughter. Leda is drawn in particular to a young woman in a bikini ( Dakota Johnson), playing with her small daughter. Leda can no longer concentrate on her reading, so she watches them, trying to put together who is who. Men, women, children, talking loudly, splashing, setting up blankets and chairs and food. A couple days into her vacation, a boisterous loud family arrives on the beach. She endures conversation, waiting for it to end. She's polite, yet seems unable to bear social interactions. The caretaker Lyle ( Ed Harris) is kind and helpful, but there's something strained in Leda's responses. Leda ( Olivia Colman) settles into her vacation, reading on the beach, swimming, and trying to sleep at night even though the beam from the nearby lighthouse swoops through her room like a searchlight.

You get the uneasy sense that Leda may not be the most reliable of narrators. 'The Lost Daughter' traverses extremely rocky terrain, and Gyllenhaal's close focus on her lead actress, hewing to the close first-person of the novel, makes for an unnerving and at times even frightening experience. Leda does not know why she does half the things she does. On the second page of Ferrante's book, Leda states: 'The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.' Notice that it's not 'don't' understand. Why does Leda do what she does? Well, you learn a lot of the backstory, but any one answer given would be incomplete. One of the most extraordinary things about 'The Lost Daughter' is Gyllenhaal's dogged resistance to explaining the mystery of Leda.

Wild at heart review roger ebert