A Netflix Movie Echoing the Strain of Pandemic Parenting

We’re nearly two years into the pandemic and parents are not okay. Variants have upended schooling. Tests are in short supply. And a work-life balance that disappeared in 2020 feels no closer to returning. It’s enough to make some mothers get together to just scream.

Few works of entertainment express the strains and contradictions of parenthood today like Netflix’s The Lost Daughter. The movie portrays a woman named Leda Caruso at two different points in her life: Olivia Colman is present-day Leda, a professor on holiday in Greece. And Jessie Buckley plays Leda two decades earlier, a mother with two young daughters who is struggling to balance parenting and her creative ambitions.

Adapted from the Elena Ferrante novel of the same name, The Lost Daughter weaves the two time periods into a blur of joy, stress, and regret. Colman’s Leda watches a young mother on the beach and thinks back to working in her apartment at 28 as her two girls cry for her attention. “I felt like I’d been trying not to explode, and then I exploded,” she admits. Unlike other recent works about “bad mothers,” The Lost Daughter doesn’t tell Leda’s story with judgment. It’s the rare film that understands the secret shame of motherhood.

When the director Maggie Gyllenhaal read the Ferrante novel, one line stuck with her: “I’m not a natural mother.” That painful disconnect—between what Leda wants and what she feels she should want—animates the film. The tension of that one sentence vibrates throughout Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, echoing the expectations placed on mothers that have felt all the more impossible in 2022.

For an episode of ’s culture podcast , David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Shirley Li analyze . Is anyone a “natural