“The Lost Daughter,” like “The White Lotus” and “Nine Perfect Strangers,” takes its characters on vacation but they’re hardly getting away.
Are we our best or worst selves when we go on vacation? Sure, these trips are taken with good intentions, but when you’re determined to relax, that determination can look an awful lot like work. Throw in bad weather, a crying child or downed hotel Wi-Fi, and sometimes you arrive back home in a more bedraggled state than when you left. When it comes to chronicling just how easily a vacation can push people to the edge, Hollywood has been racking up a lot of frequent-flier miles lately. The recent spate of film and TV projects about good trips gone bad even led the Vulture film critic Alison Willmore to coin the phrase “resort horror,” a term that could apply not just to M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old,” an actual horror film about rapidly aging beachgoers, but also to HBO’s “The White Lotus” and Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers,” two limited series about punctured privilege in some of the most beautiful getaways on earth. Isn’t that just the way: We’ve been so anxious to leave our homes over the last year and a half, and now Hollywood is telling us that escapism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This has all been on my mind after spending the last several days at the Venice Film Festival, a place so gorgeous and glamorous that to lodge even a single complaint (about the festival’s obtuse ticketing system, perhaps) makes you feel something like the whining, entitled bro played by Jake Lacy in “The White Lotus.” But many of the high-profile films here have been dabbling in resort horror, too, like “Sundown,” with Tim Roth vacationing in Acapulco — a colleague dubbed it “The Even-Whiter Lotus” — and especially “ The Lost Daughter, ” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut and the beneficiary of plenty of Oscar chatter.
