The Lost Daughter Ending Explained: Is Leda Dead Or Alive? What Does The Oranges Mean? Spoilers Ahead!

The Lost Daughter is a very exciting drama movie that came on Netflix and is making the most successful among subscribers. In the story, we follow a woman who is unexpectedly confronted with her past while on vacation. When she meets a mother and daughter on the beach, Leda is taken back to her own difficult days as a young mother and forced to face unresolved memories. An unexpected act pulls her further into mental anguish, slipping into psychological suspense while keeping her tone emotionally heavy. In this post, we’re going to talk about the end of the movie Beware of spoilers.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut has finally arrived and audiences can now watch The Lost Daughter. The Netflix film boasts an exceptional cast consisting of Olivia Colman. Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Peter Sarsgaard and many more, bringing a haunting tale to life.

The Lost Daughter is inspired by the book of the same name by Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose identity remains secret to this day. This author has seen many of his works adapted into series and films, with Maggie Gyllenhaal doing the same for Netflix. If you have any questions regarding The Lost Daughter ending, read on!

The Lost Daughter Ending Explained: Is Leda Dead Or Alive?

At the end of The Lost Daughter, we see Leda talking to her daughters on the phone, and her expressions become peaceful. We hear Bianca say that she tried to contact her mother as Leda picks up an orange and begins to peel it.

This is how this film ends, leaving us with just enough ambiguity that we remain unsure of Leda’s fate. It seems her daughters desperately tried to contact her. This seems to make Leda happy, probably because she gets a much needed reminder that her daughters still love her.

However, the orange Leda mysteriously picks up and begins to peel changes everything. When she walks towards the water’s edge after her accident the night before, she has no orange with her. In The Lost Daughter, the act of peeling an orange is recurrently linked to the happy memories Leda has with her daughters. So it’s highly symbolic that she begins to peel an orange when she speaks to her daughters at the end of The Lost Daughter.

It’s possible that the final scenes show us glimpses of a certain version of the afterlife of Leda. In this case, she dies in the crash, or perhaps by the sea on the fateful night, and her awakening is actually the beginning of life after Leda’s death.

In the book, after Leda is saddened by Nina’s anger and hurt, she returns home, but while she is moving away, she receives a call from her daughters, who ask her how she is. Leda’s response is the last line of the novel: “I’m dead, but I’m fine.” Both endings leave the audience open to interpretation of what happens next.

What Does The Oranges Mean In The Lost Daughter?

In their first appearances in The Lost Daughter, oranges symbolize the happy memories Leda has of her relationship with her daughters as a young mother. In what becomes a repetitive flashback, a young Leda and her two daughters are seen peeling an orange, trying to peel the skin off in a single, spiraling piece. Throughout the film, Leda’s happy memories with her daughters are mainly marked by them peeling an orange and singing the song of the snake.

Once this fact is established, the fruit begins to appear in other parts of the story. When Leda first moves into her vacation apartment, the seemingly fresh orange in the fruit basket turns out to be rotten. This, we will understand later, augurs the dark psychological journey that Leda undertakes shortly after.

In fact, Leda brings up the rotten orange to Lyle at the bar, and her knowing laugh can be interpreted as her own troubled past. The film’s final scene confirms that the orange is a crucial signal of direction. She begins to peel the orange and seems satisfied for the first time listening to the voices of her daughters.

However, the appearance of the orange Leda did not have on her when she stumbled onto the beach the night before is a source of ambiguity. It seems to indicate that the final scene is not real, but that it takes place in Leda’s imagination and that it may be a dream. So, oranges are skillfully used to symbolize Leda’s memories, and we see the fruit in different states. The inexplicable orange seen in the last scene is particularly prominent and adds to the strong yet subtle psychological thriller tone of the film.