(Spoilers)
The Lost Daughter is a horror film about motherhood.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feature directorial debut asks us to resist the ideology around motherhood — that it’s natural because it’s sometimes biological and that we must love it because women are innately caring.
What happens when we examine our ideologies and mythologies about motherhood and let mothers be people, with rich inner lives and selves, that are often at odds with care giving?
What if we let mothers be fathers? What if we queer the whole enterprise?
It’s also a horror film about the patriarchy and they way it exerts its power over mothers. But what it’s really about is being a mother during COVID. But what it’s really about is the lack of free or subsidized childcare in America, and what that does to mothers, which is to break their will, and to yolk them completely to capitalism.
Mothers are the perfect workers. They rarely go on strike.
In The Lost Daughter, Leda Caruso, a literature professor goes on a working holiday to Greece where she meets a young mother who is struggling in the midst of a controlling extended family, a criminal husband, and a young daughter. The film reveals Leda’s history as a mother in flashbacks.
