Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stylish directorial debut, adapted from Ferrante’s novel, is led by a central performance of real star quality
A rich, complex and fascinating performance from Olivia Colman is what gives this movie its piercing power: she has some old-school star quality and screen presence. Colman is the centre of a stylish feature debut from Maggie Gyllenhaal as writer-director, adapting a novel by Elena Ferrante: the result is an absorbingly shaped psychological drama, built around a single traumatising event from which the action metastasises. It takes place partly in the present and also in the lead character’s remembered past, triggered by a calamity that she witnesses and in which she decides, insidiously, to participate. These scenes aren’t simply flashbacks; they have their own relevance and urgency which run alongside the immediate action.
The setting is a Greek island where Leonard Cohen is supposed to have hung out in the 1960s. A British academic arrives on holiday: this is Leda, played by Colman, a Yorkshire-born professor of comparative literature at Harvard, and she has clearly been looking forward to this break for ages, settling almost ecstatically into the vacation apartment into which her bags are carried by the property’s housekeeper Lyle (Ed Harris), an expatriate American who is wizened but virile-looking.
