The Lost Daughter (2021)

Psychoanalysis describes a magical object—a stuffed bunny, a blue blanket, a doll—that the child uses to deal with all of the sensational loss of being born. The child falls in love with this object and the object becomes a magical item with which to buffer a terrifying reality. In this particular movie this magic object is a doll that Olivia Colman steals from a 4 year-old girl; the girl is distraught, Olivia Colman does not care. The scene here is a Greek tourist island: the ocean is always present, lapping, gurgling, glimmering, being beautiful; nevertheless, the mood is tense: something is wrong. Olivia Colman holds the doll, examines its face, brushes its hair, stuffs it in a cupboard; the doll has all of the horror movie vibes of a Chucky doll, but Olivia loves it anyhow. As to who the “lost daughter” is, the movie remains inconclusive: Is Olivia Colman the lost daughter? Or is it her two daughters who are lost? Or are all daughters somehow lost? We become aware that the womb can oscillate between solace and suffocation; that motherhood is a sweet dream tangled up in nightmare. One may recover from childhood, but can one ever recover from life itself?