Reviewed on February 14th at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival – In Competition. 93 Mins
Cast: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez, Yann Gael, Patsy Ferran
Genre: Drama
Director: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
In Irish Cinemas: Now
A Sun-Soaked Fever Dream of Dependency and Rebellion in Hot Milk
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s elliptical directorial debut explores a young woman’s psychic unravelling under the oppressive weight of maternal dysfunction, but fails to illuminate her inner storm fully.
In Hot Milk, a sensuous yet disquieting adaptation of Deborah Levy’s acclaimed novel, the Mediterranean sun scorches the screen while something darker festers beneath: the unspoken trauma of a mother, and the quietly simmering rebellion of her daughter. Set in a remote Spanish coastal town, the film examines a fraught mother-daughter relationship through a haze of psychological tension and opaque symbolism. It’s a story that aches to be told from within a troubled mind—but without the first-person intimacy of Levy’s prose, much of its emotional urgency dissipates into heat and silence.
Rose, played with flinty irritability by the formidable Fiona Shaw, is a woman stuck, both physically and emotionally. She has a mysterious paralysis of the legs, a condition that has eluded diagnosis and now seems more metaphysical than medical. Multiple doctors have shrugged her off; some suspect it’s psychosomatic, rooted in past trauma. She refuses to acknowledge it. Instead, she and her daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey), a quietly observant anthropologist in her mid-20s, have fled to Spain in search of healing under the care of an enigmatic practitioner, Dr. Gomez (Vincent Perez), whose methods lean more toward the spiritual than the scientific.
Yet Hot Milk isn’t about cures. It’s about contagion—the way pain, repression, and emotional dependence seep from one generation to the next. And Sofia, caught in the undertow of her mother’s dysfunction, is the one in danger of drowning.
Sofia is a passive protagonist by design—a vessel slowly filling with resentment and confusion. Mackey’s performance hints at a rich interiority that the script never quite develops. Her Sofia floats through her days in Spain, stealing moments of reprieve in the sea (infested with jellyfish) and slipping into a tentative, sultry flirtation with Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), a mercurial figure who is herself haunted by past wounds. But every breath of freedom is interrupted by the gravitational pull of her mother’s neediness, her complaints, her veiled criticisms. Shaw’s Rose is a tyrant in disguise—a woman who uses her illness as both shield and sword, locking her daughter into a dynamic of servitude while berating her for lacking ambition.
Director Rebecca Lenkiewicz, best known for co-writing Ida and She Said, constructs this dynamic with simmering tension but allows too much to remain unsaid. Levy’s novel offered Sofia’s internal monologue as a guide through the shifting emotional sands; Lenkiewicz removes that anchor, and what remains is often frustratingly vague. The viewer is left grasping for motivation, for clarity, for answers that never fully arrive.
Is Sofia seeking independence, or simply drifting toward whatever offers momentary escape? Her flirtation with Ingrid feels less like desire and more like displacement—another troubled woman to tend to, another emotional maze to lose herself in. The film flirts with eroticism but seldom explores it with depth or consequence. Even a detour to Greece, where Sofia reconnects with her estranged father (a disquieting Vangelis Mourikis), adds little beyond ambiguity.
There’s an argument to be made that Hot Milk is not supposed to offer resolution—that its hazy, dreamlike structure mirrors Sofia’s dissociation. However, the film too often confuses obliqueness with complexity. Scenes blur into one another without a clear sense of time passing. Characters seem suspended in limbo, their lives dormant between appearances. The editing, by Mark Towns (Love Lies Bleeding), lends a woozy fluidity that borders on aimlessness.
Despite its narrative shortcomings, the film is visually alluring. Sunlight dances on the water; colours blend into one another with painterly beauty. The environment is ripe for transformation, yet Sofia seems stranded—emotionally, spiritually, and narratively.
The film culminates in a final scene that lands like a slap: abrupt, ambiguous, and faintly grotesque, reminiscent of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It’s a sharp left turn that reframes the entire film as a meditation on breaking inherited cycles—on the desperate, painful necessity of severing ties before they suffocate you. It’s also the film’s most precise moment of thesis, arriving almost too late.
Levy’s novel posed subtle, existential questions about dependence, identity, and inherited pain. Lenkiewicz gestures toward those ideas but struggles to articulate them fully onscreen. There’s a sense that Hot Milk wants to say something about the elasticity of human nature—about how we bend, snap, and eventually re-form. Still, it lacks the psychological infrastructure to make those themes resonate.
Sofia references Margaret Mead in her anthropology thesis, noting that human behaviour is both adaptable and constrained. The same could be said of this film. It aims to stretch beyond conventional narrative boundaries, but it’s held back by its reluctance to commit to either surrealism or psychological realism.
Ultimately, Hot Milk is a film about paralysis—both literal and metaphorical. It captures the stifling grip of a toxic relationship, the invisible bruises of maternal guilt and obligation, and the long, painful process of stepping out of someone else’s shadow. But for all its lyrical imagery and loaded silences, the film ultimately fails to give Sofia, or the audience, the clarity or catharsis they crave.
Still, as a debut feature, it suggests Lenkiewicz is a filmmaker willing to grapple with rugged emotional terrain. One only wishes she had dug a little deeper into the wounds she so carefully exposes.
Overall: 6.5/10
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