Can someone be wholly bad or good? Does our understanding of these ideas change with context? Is being either really just innate or can we change? Upon watching The Lost Daughter, these questions will soon monopolise your thinking.

We follow Leda, played by the ever-excellent Olivia Colman, who is a professor on a Greek summer holiday. It starts off as any idyllic beach getaway spent in perfect solitude should: settling into her villa, eating ice cream on a sun lounger and losing herself in reading. That all quickly turns to a less-than-desirable situation, though, once Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her family descend.

Loud, high-pitched and brash, Nina’s family can’t be ignored but Leda’s initial annoyance of the young mother’s brood quickly becomes a growing obsession. They are also our first example of ‘badness’ within the film: they’re rude to Leda and we later learn that they’re “bad people,” according to summer worker Will, played by Normal People’s Paul Mescal.

Although she is our protagonist, we learn about Leda slowly through a series of flashbacks. A young and busy academic, Jessie Buckley (The Courier) shines in the role as a young Leda. She’s rushed off her feet, juggling work commitments and two young daughters.

The flashbacks are tense to watch and Buckley is nearly always at the point of snapping – that’s how preoccupied she seems. She shouts at her daughters, even breaks a glass door, but makes up for it with hugs, kisses and homecooked meals. The bad is often outweighed with the good here and The Lost Daughter does a brilliant job of placing this binary thinking onto the subject matter at hand: motherhood.

The Lost Daughter: at the heart of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s psychodrama is the battle between good and evil