“I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you it was wonderful,” reads the epigraph of Hot Milk. That quote is almost too easy to turn back against the film, but sometimes the simplest way to dismiss something is also the easiest. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut feels like hell to endure, and none of its mother-daughter drama is wonderful, not least because the screenplay is too self-conscious in its avoidance of verbalization to propel the narrative forward. Lenkiewicz counts on her collaborators to sell the deliberate ambiguities of the story, but nothing sticks to the nebulously designed framework of the film.
Adapted by Lenkiewicz from Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel of the same name, the film never gains momentum within its cascading rhythm of staccato sequences that establish just how out of sync its central mother-daughter pair is. The ailing Rose (Fiona Shaw) suffers from an illness that feels too conveniently metaphoric. She’s confined to a wheelchair and requires frequent attention from Sofia (Emma Mackey). Yet she manages to summon the strength to get up and walk about once a year, though it comes at a time she cannot predict. Sofia is mostly just along for the ride as she continues her studies of anthropologist Margaret Mead.
The abrupt transitions between scenes may function nicely as a representation of a delicate détente, but it also robs the story of much-needed cohesion. Though Hot Milk shows plenty of Rose and Sofia’s caustic disregard for each other, it’s missing the undercurrent, however soft, of love that exists in even the most dyspeptic familial bonds. Such connective tissue might have helped to elucidate why the characters begin embarking on solo reparative journeys in the film.
Hot Milk eventually bifurcates alongside the characters’ diverging trajectories. While Rose seeks to finally crack the code of her body’s fickle faculties with a healer named Gómez (Vincent Perez), Sofia finds unexpected romance along the Spanish shores with a free-wheeling German traveler, Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Yet any hopes that the codependent mother and daughter will show different sides of themselves to another person are quickly dashed. Their scenes away from one another reveal little things about their personalities, sure, but the clues as to how their relationship became so strained never shake the film out of its soporific inertia.
Static shots capturing the actors in tableaux vivants, a vantage point that often feels reminiscent of Mead’s anthropological and abstracted view of humanity, underscore this unstable status quo. This dryly observational viewpoint that Lenkiewicz cultivates with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt drains the film of much-needed vitality. Even a horseback-riding Krieps galloping into the frame—as if she came straight from Manic Pixie Dream Girl central casting—cannot imbue Hot Milk with any of the heat promised by the title. Blauvelt’s choice to shoot Sofia and Ingrid’s first kiss with their faces obscured in heavy shadows is indicative of the film’s larger struggle to create any mark of distinguishment within its relationships.
Lenkiewicz entrusts most of the film to Mackey and her face’s ability to convey the unspoken yearnings for both unity and separation within a family unit. But these repeated close-ups never demonstrate anything beyond her character’s morose moping around the Spanish beachside town where she ends up. Mackey’s blank slate is stubbornly resistant to any projection onto it because Hot Milk provides so little in the way of relatable detail or resonant drama.
The film seems to exist almost exclusively in service of its final confrontation between Sofia and Rose, by which point Lenkiewicz’s audience might have already checked out due to the story’s simmering tensions. A poignant Shaw making a big disclosure is nowhere near sufficient to redeem all the languorousness that precedes her character’s turn toward the penitent and pugilistic. By the time it reaches its close, Hot Milk has long since spoiled into something rancid.
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