‘Hot Milk’ Review: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw and Vicky Krieps in a Watery Psychological Drama Lacking in Texture – Hollywood Reporter
Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterScreenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz makes her directing debut adapting Deborah Levy’s novel about the prison of a strained mother-daughter relationship.
By
David Rooney
Chief Film Critic
There’s a dryly funny moment in Hot Milk in which Rose, played with a shifting balance of acerbity and petulance by Fiona Shaw, looks across the room to contemplate the daughter who is her sole caregiver while compiling a list of her enemies. It hints at the battle lines drawn in their co-dependent relationship with a sense of humor that’s mostly missing in this listless psychological drama. Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who established her bona fides writing women-centered films like Disobedience, Ida and She Said, makes an underwhelming move into directing with this wan family affair.
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Adapted from the 2016 novel by Deborah Levy, set in the coastal city of Almería in southeast Spain, the movie abandons the book’s context of financially depressed Europe after the 2008 crash and struggles to muster either menace or beauty in its principal location. Instead, Lenkiewicz narrows the focus to her characters, and although the actors cast in those roles are more than capable, the writing gives us few reasons to care about them.
Hot Milk
The Bottom Line
Lukewarm at best.
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)Cast: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez, Patsy Ferran, Yann Gael, Vangelis MourikisDirector-screenwriter: Rebecca Lenkiewicz, based on the novel by Deborah Levy
1 hour 32 minutes
The story’s perspective belongs to Rose’s sullen daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey), an anthropology student from London in her 20s, who has accompanied her mother to Spain in a last-ditch attempt to cure the latter’s possibly psychosomatic paralysis. Rose has mortgaged her house and slapped down $25,000 Euros to be treated at a clinic run by Dr. Gomez (Vincent Perez), whose methods lean more into analysis than medicine.
The numb detachment scrawled across Sofia’s face points to her resentment at having to put her life on hold while tending to the endless needs of her demanding mother, who uses a wheelchair but has been known to walk on rare occasions.
When Gomez asks what affect her illness has had on her daughter, Rose — a narcissist who disapproves of most things, among them men, alcoholics and the taste of bottled water — shrugs off the question, saying, “None at all.” The 64-year-old says her whole life has been about endurance, but the same could be said of Sofia. The drab white cottage they have rented for the summer and the incessant barking of a neighbor’s dog do nothing to ease Sofia’s sense of purgatorial confinement.
That changes when she meets enigmatic German tourist Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), first glimpsed while riding a horse along the beach in one of DP Christopher Blauvelt’s more striking shots. Self-assured Ingrid instigates a sexual relationship that gradually veers toward love, though the bisexual German’s unapologetic disinterest in monogamy creates challenges for Sofia.
Still, the Brit starts asserting her independence by spending more time away from controlling Rose and even flying to Athens to see her estranged father Christos (Vangelis Mourikis), who encourages her to sniff around Rose’s troubled family history in Ireland.
Which is what Gomez is also doing in their daily sessions, even as the thorny Rose resists. She wants to talk about bone density while he keeps pressing her about her past. (A shortage of bone density is the primary affliction of Lenkiezicz’s screenplay.) It should surprise no one that trauma figures in a big way, echoed by a strain of melancholy that has also troubled Ingrid for decades.
Only in Rose’s case does the revelation wield some dramatic heft. The script dulls that, however, by giving her dialogue like: “I’m in the desert and there’s no water. It’s too late. There’s only pain.”
Lenkiewicz lathers up the symbolism — Sofia’s freedom in the Mediterranean waters and its curtailment when she’s repeatedly stung by jellyfish; that damned barking dog; the fiery passion of outdoor flamenco classes. Even more pointed is a reference to Margaret Mead, the subject of Sofia’s stalled studies, and her belief that life is flexible enough to change, but also elastic, meaning it can snap right back to how it was.
But this is a slow-burn drama that sparks though never ignites. Or does so only briefly in the ambiguous ending, when Sofia throws off the last vestiges of her passivity and forces her recalcitrant mother into a reckoning with her condition.
I wish I could say I found Hot Milk affecting, but it’s continually dragged down by inertia, by a writer-director whose approach is too intellectual to give space to emotion. The actors to some degree counter that shortage of feeling, especially Mackey in a largely internalized performance, but the movie is desiccated, unyielding.
Unlike the expressiveness of Blauvelt’s long collaboration with Kelly Reichardt, the visuals here look flat and unimaginative. Even what should be the palpable heat of August in southern Spain is missing. I kept thinking about the piercing clarity and bold stabs of color in Hélène Louvart’s work in a comparable setting on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s impressive directing debut, The Lost Daughter. It makes sense here that the filmmakers have refused to prettify the locations, but the detached nature of the camerawork risks infecting the viewer.Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSend us a tip using our anonymous form.
