Part of what makes the performance so powerful is how much she makes us as an audience care for her character despite her many flaws. We are even on her side right at the end, when Nina (played by Dakota Johnson) gets her revenge on Leda (Colman) by stabbing her with a hatpin.
Exactly how much damage that hatpin does is left ambiguous. We see that Leda is hurt enough that she crashes her car, but it is not entirely clear what happens at the end. Is Leda dead and what we are seeing is a dead woman’s fantasy of reconciling with her daughters as she slowly bleeding out, or has her brush with death given her the closure she needed?
Luckily, the book gives some clues for viewers who are not happy with the artistic ambiguity and want a concrete answer about what happens to Olivia Colman’s character.
Does Leda die at the end of The Lost Daughter?
The real answer is that director Maggie Gyllenhaal wants it to be ambiguous at the end, with viewers coming to their own conclusions about what happens to Leda in the movie.
For viewers who want a more definite conclusion, however, there are more clues that Leda lives.
After all, that is literally what the film shows us: Leda crashes her car and heads to the beach. There, she has lost blood, but she will live. The worry that her life was about to end while she was driving has made her realize that she needs to mend things with her daughters, and that is exactly what we see her do.
Of course, we have seen inside Leda’s mind before—much of the film is dedicated to her memories of her younger life as she describes herself as an “unnatural mother.” However, this final scene feels different—after all, in every other fantasy/memory sequence, Leda is played by Jessie Buckley, a hint to the audience that what we are seeing is Leda’s own version of herself rather than the “true” Leda.
Even if we accept that Leda is still living at the end of the movie, this does not rule out her bleeding out shortly after the movie ends.
The book, however, actually shows us what happens to Leda after she crashes her car. Elena Ferrante’s novel begins with Leda in hospital, with what she calls a “serious injury…in my left side, an inexplicable lesion.”
Then at the end of the book, we find out that Leda calls her daughters while on the beach, when she tells them “I’m dead, but I’m fine.” The film does not use these final lines, but otherwise the scene plays out essentially the same.
This too is ambiguous, but combined with the beginning there are two ways this can be read. The first is that Leda actually believes she is dying in that moment but then doesn’t, and the second is that she is talking metaphorically—that brush with death has “killed” the old selfish Leda and re-awakened a more selfless character.
The Lost Daughter is streaming now on Netflix.
