The Lost Daughter

Olivia Colman portrays a complicated woman on vacation in Greece whose collision with an unpleasant family brings back memories of her own marriage and ambivalence toward motherhood.

“The Lost Daughter” is a film more about mood, emotion and moments than a straight narrative of plot convolutions. Characters reveal themselves and are changed just by the nature of being in each other’s orbit, their connections and collisions feeding the story rather than the other way around.

Olivia Colman plays Leda, a British professor of Italian literature by way of Cambridge, Mass., on summer vacation on an unnamed bucolic Greek island. She’s 48, independent and alone, by choice. She rents a car and a bright little villa, looking forward to a few months of sun, reading, writing and thinking.

Other people keep getting in the way of her craving for solitude, and Leda experiences stages of annoyance, followed by feeling guilty for being abrupt with someone, punctuated by little windows of time she opens and invites someone in.