Metacritic reviews

A highly polished film that belies the soap opera melodrama of its plotline by having the twists and turns spring directly from well-observed human behavior, Stone's The Daughter is a quiet, immensely affecting triumph.

Deeply involving and emotionally searing, The Daughter reps a confident and profoundly moving bigscreen debut for established theater director Simon Stone.

Few films make you care about the characters like this one does.

What The Daughter lacks in narrative surprises, however, it works hard to make up for in its confident approach.

Made with taste, skill and discretion, The Daughter demonstrates both the staying power of classic material and the risks inherent in bringing it up to date.

Somehow what comes close to dissolving into heartbreaking tragedy instead offers the merest whiff of hope for the future. As Neill’s seen-it-all Walter says when all hell begins to break loose, “Everyone’s got a story like this … it’s as old as the hills.” If only said tale were told with a bit more consistency.

The Daughter spends most of its time following a recessive character who possesses information we’re not privy to, and the whole thing manages to be both remote and unsubtle simultaneously.

The characters don’t have conversations so much as helpfully recite their back stories, and the long-buried secret is soon so obvious that the movie’s last-act hysteria feels forced and a little ridiculous.

The dreary, chug-along Australian film The Daughter offers a good but sadly wasted cast, obscured in the eye-rubbing mist of a foggy Down Under countryside and struggling to rise above the sludge of a basic soap opera with literary pretensions.

It too often strains for a tragic gravity that its ultimately melodramatic characters never earn.