Dakota Johnson, left, and Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter (Netflix)

Actor Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut is many things at once. Her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel heightens the thriller trappings, though, at its heart, it remains an intimate, warts-and-all portrait of women on various verges of breakdowns. It’s also a showcase for one of the strongest ensembles of the year, with Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Ed Harris, and Paul Mescal, hot off Normal People—talk about luxury casting.

The New Yorker hailed Ferrante’s slender yet loaded novel as “a brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence.” The same could be said of Gyllenhaal’s adaptation, which remains extraordinarily faithfully to Ferrante’s prose, yet it has its own tone. The beginning borrows from the film noir playbook, where the first sound heard is the ominous bleating of a fog horn. A woman dressed in white, with what appears to be a bloodstain on her blouse, staggers toward a pebble beach, then sways and collapses on her side. Cut to the same woman a week earlier, now in daylight, driving down a winding road accompanied by Dickon Hinchliffe’s jazz-flavored, ’70s-retro score. Leda (Colman, here at her most Everywoman) has arrived on a Greek isle where she has rented an apartment for a working holiday.

At 48, she’s there all by herself, and, as a professor of literature, she brings along her work on daily sojourns to the beach, often sitting right out in the sun, blissfully alone in her thoughts or unaware that she’s no longer lying under the umbrella’s shade. On her full day of sunbathing, she has the beach to herself until a large and loud group of Americans invade and take it over (as though to explain their behavior, the interlopers hail from Queens). They are oblivious to the commotion they make, and dominate the sand, at one point asking others to move so their group can expand their territory. Leda refuses, the first of many awkward and tense interactions.

Gyllenhaal substitutes Ferrante’s first-person narrative with shots/scenes filmed from Leda’s perspective, which efficiently conveys her feelings and thoughts. In a sequence told from her point of view, she takes in her now rowdy surroundings, which includes a beautiful young woman with a toned body made for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, Nina (a dark-haired Johnson, unrecognizable at first), and her infant daughter, who has brought her blonde doll to the beach. She watches the mother and infant wade in the waters or play in the sand, ignoring her work load all together. Perhaps the loudest voice on the beach belongs to Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who, at 42, is seven months pregnant (for the first time) and the one calling the shots.

What passes for a nimble plot is the disappearance of the year’s most symbolic MacGuffin: the beloved doll of Nina’s daughter, which goes missing on the beach. Well, not without a trace. Leda has absconded, inexplicably at first, with the raggedy object, stuffing it into her tote bag and keeping it for herself. The doll takes on a meaning perhaps more unsettling than Chucky.

Scenes frequently alternate between the tension under the hot Greek summer sun and flashbacks to Leda’s stressful domestic doldrums as she raises two high-strung, high-maintenance daughters while studying for an academic career—her husband is frequently gone. Here, Buckley plays the younger Leda. However, the film hits its themes somewhat redundantly in the numerous motherhood-is-hard meltdowns.

Yet, because the screenplay refrains from pat, armchair analysis or spilling-the-guts monologues, motivations come across as murky and mercurial. As Nina, Johnson is particularly cryptic. With a Cheshire Cat smile, you’re not sure if she wants to kill or kiss Leda. (Her off-the-cuff rapport with Leda turns flirtatious at a glance.) With a light touch, the underlying reasons why Leda would steal a child’s plaything are there on screen.

The screenplay has transferred the story from Southern Italy, and the change of scenery has foregone references to the Camorra. However, the film underlines the story’s sinister element, now bestowed upon the gauche Americans—Dominczyk, in particular, gives the evilest of eyes. When Leda encounters Nina’s thuggish extended family, Gyllenhaal leans toward the thriller genre, which disguises what is essentially a lo-fi drama. Yet if you shed the red herrings and jump scares (at one point, Leda may have been assaulted by a thrown—and sharp—pine cone), it’s actually a straightforward portrayal of stress, of the “crushing responsibility” of raising children, as Leda describes it. Make no mistake, this is not a thriller but a character study, with a lot of nervous energy to spare.