122 min | R | December 17, 2021 | Netflix
Leda goes to the Greek coast for a quiet working holiday. A young mother and her small daughter pull her back into a past she has spent decades refusing to explain. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a film about the mothers who walk away and declines to call them monsters.
Leda Caruso is a middle-aged comparative literature professor who takes a solo holiday on a Greek island. She watches a large, loud family from Queens take over the beach. One young mother, Nina, holds her attention. When Nina’s small daughter goes missing for a few minutes, something old and unresolved cracks open in Leda. The film adapts Elena Ferrante, and it is about the kind of motherhood that culture refuses to discuss. It studies a woman who loved her children and left them anyway.
Olivia Colman plays Leda as a woman performing ease while a private wound bleeds underneath. She smiles at strangers and flinches at children. Jessie Buckley plays the younger Leda in flashback, a brilliant academic drowning in two small daughters and her own ambition. The two performances rhyme without imitating each other. Dakota Johnson plays Nina with exhausted glamour and dawning recognition. Ed Harris plays Lyle, the resort caretaker, with weathered warmth, and Peter Sarsgaard plays Professor Hardy as the kind of charming academic who makes leaving feel like ambition.
Maggie Gyllenhaal writes and directs her first feature with a confidence that does not announce itself. She shoots Leda in tight, handheld close-ups that trap the audience inside her discomfort. The camera rarely gives her room to breathe. The editing cuts between the holiday and the flashbacks without warning, so the past intrudes on the present the way memory actually works. Gyllenhaal builds dread out of small objects. A rotting piece of fruit, a child’s doll, and a cicada in a hotel bed all carry more menace than any plot device.
The film never lets Leda off the hook and never condemns her either. It holds her ambivalence steady and asks the audience to sit in it. Gyllenhaal refuses the easy version where a bad mother is explained and forgiven by the final scene. She makes a film about a woman who is honest about a feeling that mothers are forbidden to admit. The discomfort is the achievement.