Review: In 'The Lost Daughter,' rookie director Maggie Gyllenhaal and stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley conspire to depict an intriguingly flawed character

Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a shattering debut as a writer and director in “The Lost Daughter,” a quietly intense drama about a woman on vacation who learns the old lesson that no matter where you go, there you are.

Leda (Olivia Colman) is a professor of English from Cambridge, Mass., trying to have a nice, quiet vacation in a seaside town in Greece, reading her books and relaxing. Her calm is broken when a boisterous Italian family takes up residence around her on her favorite beach spot. Despite her annoyance, she makes conversation with a couple of the women, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk) and her sister Nina (Dakota Johnson), who has a young daughter.

Watching Nina with her little girl sets Leda to thinking about her two now-adult daughters, and soon we’re seeing flashbacks of young Leda (Jessie Buckley) raising those girls, Bianca (Robyn Elwell) and Martha (Ellie Blake). Leda, we see, was uncomfortable in motherhood, sometimes losing her temper at her girls for interrupting her literature studies. The flashbacks also show Leda’s tempestuous relationship with the girls’ father, Joe (Jack Farthing), and an affair with an academic (Peter Sarsgaard) who complimented her work.

While befriending Nina, Leda makes a rash decision — not her first, as the flashbacks show — that has dire consequences.

In adapting Laura Ferrente’s novel, Gyllenhaal creates an emotionally raw portrait of a woman haunted by her past deeds, and facing a choice of running from them or defiantly standing up to what she’s done with her life.

(It’s worth noting that Gyllenhaal’s dad, Stephen, is a movie director, and her mother, Naomi Foner, is a screenwriter with one Oscar nomination.)

It’s difficult to think of anyone other than Colman to tackle such a tricky character, which she does with equal measures of irritation and remorse. If anyone else could, it’s Buckley, whose prickly intelligence sets up the young Leda that Colman’s older Leda must confront. Together, Colman, Buckley and Gyllenhaal create an emotionally raw but tightly contained portrait of a complicated, contradictory woman.

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‘The Lost Daughter’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 24, in theaters; available to stream December 31 on Netflix. Rated R for sexual content/nudity and language. Running time: 121 minutes.