“I’m an unnatural mother.” It was this one line that drew first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal to adapt the 2006 Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter. Her new Netflix film of the same name examines motherhood and its secret shames.
Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, the movie portrays a woman at two different points in her life: Colman as a present-day professor on holiday in Greece, and Buckley as a mother with two young daughters decades earlier. Arriving two years into a pandemic whose burden has fallen especially hard on parents, the movie received a fiercely polarized reaction.
David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Shirley Li analyze The Lost Daughter and the questions it raises. Is anyone a “natural mother”? How far does society expect women to sacrifice for their children? And how did they react to the film as parents?
Further reading:
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Top Gun
Knocked Up
Winning Time
Severance
The Northman
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Turning Red
Is Pop Music Obsessed With Nostalgia?
The Dropout
West Side Story
The Batman
Drive My Car
The Power of the Dog
Pam & Tommy
Can Rom-Coms Make a Comeback?
The Experiment: Uncle Spam
Yellowjackets
Frasier
Don't Look Up
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
I Finally Watched...
Kill James Bond!
Blank Check with Griffin & David
Now Playing - The Movie Review Podcast
Dead Meat Podcast