The Lost Daughter follows Leda, a college professor who travels to a Greek island for a much-needed vacation. While there, she becomes fixated on Nina, a young mother who seems to have a perfect life with her family.
As Leda's obsession with Nina grows, she begins to have flashbacks to her own past and confronts painful secrets that she has been suppressing for years. She begins to see parallels between her life and Nina's, and the complex relationships between mothers and daughters become a central theme.
The film stars Olivia Colman as Leda, Dakota Johnson as Nina, and Jessie Buckley as Leda's younger self. The screenplay was adapted by Maggie Gyllenhaal from the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante, and the film marks Gyllenhaal's directorial debut.
The Lost Daughter premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021 and received critical acclaim for both Gyllenhaal's direction and Colman's performance. The film is set to be released in theaters in December 2021 before streaming on Netflix in January 2022.