At the end of The Lost Daughter, is Leda alive or has she died?
In the opening scene of The Lost Daughter (Netflix), Leda collapses at night on the beach. So it shouldn't be a surprise to see that towards the end of the film, Leda collapses on the beach. Afterwards, however, she awakens, calls her daughter(s) and starts to peel an orange that seems to materialize in her hand.
Up to that point, the movie remained without anything surreal or supernatural happening. There was metaphor (e.g. rotten fruit) but no magical/inexplicable occurrences.
On the one hand, she was injured by the hatpin shoved into her abdomen, but that is a far cry from a quickly lethal injury. A death from such an injury would be from peritonitis and sepsis, not internally bleeding to death (unless she hit a mesenteric artery - which would be truly rare - but even so, the bleeding would be slow. The filmmaker isn't a medical expert, so this could represent a lethal injury. If so, Leda died, and the happy ending represents the end of her suffering.
On the other hand, maybe the filmmaker knows this is a dangerous but unlikely-to-be-lethal injury. Leda's relationship with her daughters is questionable; one daughter practically hangs up on her when of Leda starts to talk about her holiday. Maybe the orange, whole and healthy, represents Leda's finally coming to grips with her inadequacies as a mother, and a return (symbolized by the peeling of the orange with her daughters happily chatting on the phone) to a better relationship with them.
I'm conflicted. The sudden supernatural appearance of the orange is at complete odds with the entire tone of the movie, which is that of imminent danger.
Is Leda alive or did she die?
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What happens to Leda at the end of The Lost Daughter?
She then confesses to stealing Elena's doll, and tells Nina that it was her way of "playing." Nina becomes enraged at the revelation, stabbing Leda in the abdomen with a hatpin.Why did Leda keep the doll in The Lost Daughter?
The doll allows her to practice feminine actions she could not pass on to her daughters, to atone for the crime of leaving them in order to pursue an affair and her academic ambitions.The Lost Daughter Ending Explained: Is Leda Dead Or Alive?
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