The plot of Elena Ferrante’s 2008 novel, The Lost Daughter, wouldn’t strike most people as inherently cinematic. Leda, a middle-aged, Italian college professor on vacation in an unspecified seaside town, spends much of her time alone—on the beach or in her rented cabin, having only occasional, awkward interactions with locals and fellow tourists. As she watches 20-something vacationer Nina happily playing with her young daughter, Elena, Leda recalls her troubled relationship with her now-grown daughters. When Elena wanders off and briefly goes missing, Leda finds and retrieves her, bringing Leda into the orbit of Nina and her prickly extended family. On impulse, Leda secretly steals Elena’s beloved plastic doll; the child is so inconsolable that she eventually becomes ill, and Nina, who’d already been struggling with the demands and compromises of raising a child, is at wits’ end. Despite this, Leda makes no immediate move to return the doll, and it’s later revealed that her own feelings regarding motherhood are extremely complicated—due, in part, to a fateful decision she made regarding her own daughters, many years ago.

The details of that decision are revealed about halfway through Ferrante’s novel, but the brilliant new film adaptation, starring Oscar winner Olivia Colman as Leda, keeps the secret far longer. It premieres on Netflix on Dec. 31.

There are few other changes to the text; in the book, for example, Leda is an Italian professor of English literature, while in the movie, she’s an English professor of Italian literature. For the most part, though, the film sticks very close to its source; long stretches of dialogue draw directly from Ann Goldstein’s English translation of Ferrante’s Italian text, and some of the sentiments of Leda’s narration make their way into conversation, largely intact—as when she says of her daughters, “The bits that I find most beautiful about them are the bits that are alien to me.” It’s easy to imagine a version of this movie that made use of extensive voiceover to preserve the dense, insightful first-person point of view of Ferrante’s original, whose style will be familiar to fans of the author’s bestselling Neapolitan Novels and their HBO series adaptations.

However, in a bold move, Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her feature-film writing and directing debut, trusts her actors to make the most of silence. There are remarkably long sections of the movie that feature little to no dialogue at all but simply linger on Leda as she observes others or thinks back to earlier days with her husband and young children. Yet the film never drags or feels in any way padded, in spite of its two-hour-plus runtime; instead it feels very much like a thriller, but one that focuses on emotional, rather than physical, violence. Colman does a wondrous job of getting across the inner life of a solitary, antisocial character—one who clearly has some regrets in her life but is at peace with the difficult choices she has made and understands why she made them. The supporting cast is also excellent, particularly I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Jessie Buckley, as the younger Leda in flashbacks. Dakota Johnson, as Nina, and Ed Harris, as the lonely caretaker of Leda’s cabin, also deliver nuanced, thoughtful performances. It’s a film that deeply understands and internalizes the complex themes of the source material and doesn’t seek tidy resolutions. The Lost Daughter is unquestionably one of the films of the year—and one of the best book-to-screen adaptations out there.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.