Hot Milk (Rebecca Lenkiewicz, 2025) is yet more proof that you shouldn’t freely enter into relationships with polyamorous Berliners. Especially if you are an emotionally repressed daughter of an Irish woman suffering from a mysterious concatenation of chronic ailments. And most certainly if you haven’t resolved your abandonment issues from your flakey Greek father. Broken people need boring lovers — not more chaos.
Splitting the difference between a tempestuous summer lesbian drama and a moody mother-daughter tale, screenwriter-turned-director Lenkiewicz’s first turn behind the camera is an intermittently interesting sun-soaked adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel that dwells on trauma, awkward relationships and facing a new future in light of a difficult past.
Emma Mackey stars as the increasingly incensed Sofia, daughter to Fiona Shaw’s Rose, a wheelchair-bound woman who has travelled to Almería, Spain to undergo experimental treatment. Vincent Perez plays the enigmatic Dr Gomez, whose therapy is not so much about undergoing physical tests but quietly probing the inner life of Rose. But Rose is not sharing.
Her typical Irish reticence mixes with petty gripes about dogs barking and the lack of drinkable water in Spain, slowly but surely getting on Sofia’s nerves. With careful dialogue showcasing Lenkiewicz’s storied screenwriter experience, Hot Milk shows how mental trauma can manifest itself in physical ways and how a mother’s shame can easily become a daughter’s burden. Unfortunately, the film’s visual sense — although pleasant with deep blue seas, rustic coastal charm— fails to carry these ideas through metaphorical means; spelling out its concepts instead of exploring them cinematically.
One image does stand out, however. Vicky Krieps, appearing on a horse, framed like a heroine in a Ridley Scott-fantasy. Wearing a trendy bandana, a loose shirt and a twinkle in her eye, she is somehow a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and a Fuckboy mixed into one, at first appearing to help Sofia process her pain but then complicating that journey through her unashamed relationships with random men. (In reality, she is a modern Lady Godiva. Single women with mummy [and daddy] issues should look away now!)
By the end, we get two films in one. Lesbian desire by the beach and a mother emotionally blackmailing her daughter. Curiously, Rose and Krieps’ Ingrid never have any meaningful interaction, requiring the viewer to connect the dots instead of finding any sense of a genuine conflict.
Hot Milk channels a lot of the same focus as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s excellent The Lost Daughter (2021) — especially in its unabashed portrayal of feminine rage — but lacks the same powerful energy brought by the Oscar-nominated Olivia Colman. It also lacks the specificity and edge of Lenkiewicz’s screenplay for the excellent Disobedience (2017), exploring lesbian desire within the Orthodox Jewish community. Building up to a dramatic, sure-to-be-talked-about-and-hotly-debated finale, it can’t quite corral its ideas into a truly satisfying narrative. This hot milk makes for weak tea.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.