"Dead? No, I'm alive actually."
What an assured and confident directorial debut this is from Maggie Gyllenhaal!
The film focuses on Lena (Olivia Colman) who arrives at a Greek resort for a summer holiday. There's no snappy way into the plot here as we simply follow this awkward women around her vacation. She watches a noisy family arrive on the beach and refuses to move to a different umbrella to give them space. When a young girl goes missing Lena quickly finds her and returns her to her parents and becomes a holiday friend of Nina, the girl's mother (Dakota Johnson).
All the while Leda thinks back to an earlier stage in her life as she (played at a younger age by Jessie Buckley) struggled to care for her two young daughters. The structure of the film is complicated, broadly giving us two narratives but sometimes older Leda explains what we are going to see in the flashbacks.
The film is an unusual cinematic take on motherhood. Lena is not a natural mother and we see how she battles with her kids. The older Leda feels some guilt about her past actions it would seem but she isn't entirely defined by them either. The other female characters are also really complicated and not particularly good people either.
I really like that this film doesn't give you all the answers either. We get Leda's full story in the end but many of the things she says and does are never explained. As a viewer you're left trying to understand the psychology of the character and that draws you closer in to her than most films manage. Leda feels like a very real complicated person.
Olivia Colman gives yet another superb performance here, managing to insert some of her personality to the role whilst giving a very dark edge too. Jessie Buckley is also fantastic as the younger Leda and I don't think I've ever seen this dynamic or actors playing the same character at different ages and genuinely feeling like they are the same person. It's a great achievement which again helps to draw you into Leda.
An utterly superb film, all the more impressive by a first time feature director, which explores the psychology of it's lead character in a way I've not seen before.
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