Hot Milk (dir. Rebecca Lenkiewicz)
Certificate: 15
Running Time: 93 mins
UK Distributor: MUBI
UK Release Date: 4 July 2025
WHO’S IN HOT MILK?
Emma Mackey, Vicky Krieps, Fiona Shaw, Vincent Perez, Patsy Ferran, Yann Gael
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz (director, writer), Kate Glover, Giorgos Karnavas and Christine Langan (producers), Matthew Herbert (composer), Christopher Blauvelt (cinematographer), Mark Towns (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A put-upon young woman (Mackey) encounters an enigmatic traveller (Krieps) whilst in Spain…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HOT MILK?
As commonplace as they are, book-to-film adaptations almost always don’t capture what the source material is going for, which sometimes can bring about wrath from the book’s fans and even its original author. Stephen King, for instance, famously hated Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining for going in its own cerebral direction instead of the slow-burn family drama that the author intended, and I’m pretty sure that lovers of Eragon and Artemis Fowl would like to pretend that the respective adaptations of those book series never existed.
In that tradition, it’s easy to envision those who enjoyed the complexities and intimacies of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk really going off on what writer-director Rebecca Lenkiewicz does with her adaptation. By removing much of the book’s inner narration, which is where much of the understanding about the story and its characters is said to have come from, the film becomes a confusingly dull interpretation which does a huge disservice to its source by being way less interesting than it should be.
The film takes place in a small and rather dingy Spanish coastal town, where a young British woman named Sofia (Emma Mackey) has accompanied her wheelchair-bound mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) on a last-resort trip to a local facility, where they hope to find answers for Roses’ mysterious condition. Sofia, having sacrificed her studies to care for Rose full-time, is clearly on the receiving end of a rather dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, bearing the brunt of her mother’s domineering behaviour whilst being emotionally manipulated into have virtually no life of her own. Things begin to improve when Sofia encounters and soon falls for Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), an older but more free-spirited seamstress, but soon things begin to take a psychological toll on her as the trip slowly becomes a time-bomb set to destroy the co-dependency with her mother once and for all.
Unfortunately, Hot Milk – at least, in its movie form – isn’t quite as interesting as that plot description makes it sound. Lenkiewicz, making her directorial debut after previously penning the scripts for the likes of Disobedience, She Said and most recently The Salt Path – a film which, a lot like this one, also struggled to transition the dramatic weight of its source material – is clearly attempting a more visual interpretation of Levy’s text, one that conveys the inner turmoil of the original story and its characters with minimal dialogue and nuanced performances. The problem, though, is that much of what we end up seeing and hearing is strangely hollow without the addition of narrative context that Levy was kind enough to provide in her novel. As a result, it quickly becomes difficult to get invested in or even care about what these characters are going through, since it’s almost never made clear what their goals and motivations are within this situation, preventing the viewer from creating a formidable emotional connection with them in a story that is already hard to be interested in.
Since there is such a gaping hole where vital plot and character information should be, Lenkiewicz’s film often comes off as awkward when it tries to follow some of the emotional beats from the original novel. Bursts of frustration or general anger, particularly from Emma Mackey’s long-suffering protagonist Sofia, feel utterly random because there’s nothing to clearly indicate that the character has reached such a point in their journey which such expression is called for, whereas the tiniest bit of narration or further clarity in the sparse dialogue would actually have helped wonders with understanding what she is going through. Lenkiewicz gifts the most filmic characterisation to Fiona Shaw’s Rose, who actually comes the closest to being a fully-rounded character with a mindset we can at least understand, even if it is ultimately a harmful one, but very little of that is left over for the actual main character who, despite Mackey’s very best efforts, comes off too much as a passive protagonist with seemingly nothing intriguing going for her.
The same can be said for her central romance with Vicky Krieps’s Ingrid, for despite the actors’ best efforts neither of their characters appear to have a genuine spark between them, since they hardly share any lines with one another before their first moment of passion with one another, making it seem like they’re attracted to each other just because the script says so. Sometimes, the ways in which Lenkiewicz frames their romance are just bizarre, particularly during early moments that signal quite heavily that one of these lovers, and it’s easy to guess which, might actually be a figment of the other’s imagination. After all, they are initially never seen interacting with anyone else other than the main character, and at one point they even show up outside their bedroom window in the middle of the night to instigate a love scene, all of which are signs that this is the protagonist’s vivid and lonely imagination at work. But after a while, it becomes more than apparent that this isn’t the case, which retrospectively makes those earlier moments – especially the whole thing of randomly appearing outside the much younger person’s window – weirdly staged and even unnecessarily creepy.
If you’ve read the original book and are hoping that the film does justice to the provocative themes and innovative storytelling that made it an acclaimed hit with readers, you’re in for a mighty disappointment for Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk nixes all of that for a mood piece that’s deeply uninteresting in making its viewer feel any type of mood.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Hot Milk is a weirdly dull adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel that sees writer-director Rebecca Lenkiewicz remove much of the narrative context in favour of a more visual, but consequently less emotionally engaging, slog.
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