By Kate Bove
Sultry-yet-ill-fated affairs, windswept European beaches, and the particular agony of queer yearning are all key ingredients in remarkable films like Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Call Me by Your Name. However, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, which adapts Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name, fails to mix these elements into something satisfying.
Shot in Greece — which, rather unconvincingly, stands in for Spain — this family drama centers on Sofia (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) and her mother, Rose (an always-impressive Fiona Shaw). To say the mother-daughter duo have a strained relationship is an understatement. After Sofia’s father left his turbulent marriage to Rose to start fresh in Athens, Rose became incredibly dependent on her then-young daughter. Now a college-aged woman, Sofia has grown accustomed to her role as caretaker — though her resentment is pretty palpable too. And that only makes Rose cling harder.
Hot Milk opens with Rose and Sofia settling into a seaside cottage for the summer. Nearby is an expensive, state-of-the-art wellness center full of clinicians who, through a variety of treatments and studies, hope to understand the cause of Rose’s seemingly sudden paralysis. One expert, Dr. Gomez (Vincent Perez), clocks Rose’s controlling, avoidant, and co-dependent demeanor and suggests that Rose’s physical condition could be psychosomatic. Although Sofia isn’t sure what to believe, her long-held resentment toward her mother deepens.
When she tries to enjoy time away from the cottage, Sofia really only finds peace in the water. Soon enough, Hot Milk’s most frustrating character appears: Ingrid (Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps). Riding down the beach on horseback, Ingrid is precisely the manic pixie fuckboy Sofia doesn’t need in her life. There’s a stilted, dream-like quality to many of Sofia and Ingrid’s interactions that’s more jarring than intriguing. Dialogue is unnatural, steamy moments end before they really begin, and Sofia flits around, free of consequences but enacting nightmarish damage to anyone in her orbit.
Between the ever-oppressive Rose, the unreliable Ingrid, and her own indecision, Sofia is horribly aimless. (Or, as the near-constant water imagery will remind you, she’s adrift.) She makes bad decisions time and again, because she isn’t used to agency, nor does she have an identity separate from being her mother’s support system. Although she’s frustrated by the controlling women around her, Sofia is drawn to manipulation.
All of this sounds appealing on paper, from the messy summer romance with the wrong person to the strange Stockholm-Syndrome-meets-Munchausen-Syndrome dynamic between Sofia and Rose. However, Hot Milk is frustratingly flat. While Shaw is always a magnetic force on screen, she isn’t given a whole lot to work with. Through no fault of Mackey’s, Sofia is resigned the whole way through. The wannabe anthropologist just goes through the motions, failing to channel the novel’s interiority or depth of emotion.
A passive observer who isn’t nearly obsessed or angry enough with the manipulative women around her, Sofia doesn’t earn her final moments — and Hot Milk, already thoroughly curdled, doesn’t either.
RATING: 2 out of 5 stars
wrap notes 