The Playlist by Tomris Laffly

The Lost Daughter leaves you haunted, shaken, and crushingly scarred like only the best of films are capable of doing.

RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley

Harrowing, unpredictable, painful, confrontational, this is a movie for grown-ups.

Entertainment Weekly by Joshua Rothkopf

It's a moviegoing experience, sure — and if you need to hear it, one of the best of the year. But it's really a call to compassion, which makes it transcendent.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Johanna Schneller

In The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal isn’t interested in judgment, only truth. Every decision she makes is exactly the right one. Her three lead actresses have never been better, and casting Buckley as the young Colman is particularly inspired. It doesn’t matter that they don’t look alike – they share a crucial essence.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

Gyllenhaal’s work with her actors is quietly spectacular, and she takes the best of Ferrante’s fearlessness while letting Colman and Buckley unfold the character’s secrets through action and reaction.

Time Out by Phil de Semlyen

The Lost Daughter expertly juggles tone, hopscotching between timelines and slipping from tender to tense and back again, always challenging the viewer’s judgments and preconceptions in unexpected ways.

Original-Cin by Linda Barnard

With brilliant work by Colman, The Lost Daughter is a haunting work about choices, motherhood, and memory.

BBC by Caryn James

The story has its moments of suspense, especially when Nina's child wanders off from the beach. But the soul of the film exists in the small exchanges and tensions between characters.

IndieWire by Jessica Kiang

Gyllenhaal’s film is a story of self-ascribed transgression and of shame buried and turned bitterly inward, and it too, is made with such alertness to the power of cinematic language – particularly that of performance – that even as you feel your stomach slowly drop at the implications of what you’re watching, you cannot break its spreading sinister spell.

Time by Stephanie Zacharek

To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.

Variety by Peter Debruge

Through it all, Gyllenhaal assumes an unfussy, practically invisible non-style that conveys the essential (like that missing doll, visible in the background of a key scene) while privileging the performances.

TheWrap by Yolanda Machado

The Lost Daughter is a masterwork in perception and all that society places upon mothers and motherhood.

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

The reclusive Italian author’s familiar themes of female relationships, sexuality, motherhood and women’s struggle to carve a professional space outside it are beautifully served in this uncompromising character study, illuminated by performances of jagged brilliance from Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as her younger self.

The Guardian by Xan Brooks

I’m not convinced, on balance, that Gyllenhaal’s delicious drama is finally much more than a storm in a teacup. But what a cup, what a storm. When Hurricane Colman blows in from the sea, be sure your roof’s in good shape and that all the windows are fastened.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Written and directed by the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, it’s a worthy adaptation – murkily funny, shiveringly intimate drama of the deranging impossibility of the “good mother” figure, with a trio of outstanding performances from Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley and Dakota Johnson.

The Film Stage by David Katz

[Gyllenhaal’s] chief successes are in making her adaptation of The Lost Daughter as intellectually engaging as the novel, whilst bringing the characters to life with performances beautifully appropriate for cinema––one thing an author doesn’t have in his or her arsenal, is summoning a camera “close-up,” with an actor creating that particular emotional transparency in tandem.