‘Hot Milk’ Review: Vicky Krieps and Emma Mackey Are Lovers Among Fiona Shaw’s Ruins in Room-Temp Mother-Daughter Drama
When Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) glides up to Sofia (Emma Mackey) on horseback like a manic-pixie mirage, Sofia immediately allured, or when Ingrid tells Sofia, “Do you have cigarettes? OK, let’s go,” even though they’ve just met, you want to believe they’re riding on some hidden code of desire, psychically linked strangers sun-baking on the Iberian peninsula of Spain. Ingrid, a German expat styled in a flowy headscarf like a breezy lesbian pirate or swashbuckling bar wench, is such a void of a woman in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut “Hot Milk” that this study of sapphic malaise along the Mediterranean becomes oddly sizzle-less.
Adapting Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel, whose title unsubtly conjures images of breastfeeding among other bodily activities related to reproduction, the “She Said” and “Disobedience” screenwriter casts Mackey and Krieps as lovers among the ruins of Fiona Shaw’s distress. The great Irish actress plays Rose, Sofia’s mother, who has schlepped her daughter to the coastal town of Almería, Spain, to locate a cure for Rose’s mysterious bone disease, which has left her unable to walk since Sofia (now in her mid-twenties) was four. Or has it, and is Rose faking it?
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A vacuum of irascible need and crustiness, Rose contemplates death when not foul-mouthing to anyone (or no one) who will listen, wondering how she might look if she fell over the rocks to her doom. Sofia, estranged from her father for the past decade, is just along for the ride, having helped mortgage her mother’s London home to pay enigmatic fringe healer Gómez (Vincent Perez) for an elusive treatment that comes with no guarantee of solving Rose’s possibly self-imposed condition.
But the central thrust of “Hot Milk,” shot with sun-stroked detachment by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, revolves around Sofia and Ingrid’s sudden relationship that forms in spite of Sofia’s exhausting care duties. Mackey, raven-haired and listless in a bikini top and cigarette in hand, is camera-genic enough to make for an appealing heroine.
But the wonderful Krieps, who has never given a bad performance and can always elevate any material, gets even less to work with, her mental wounds chalked up to a vague trauma of the past that feels like a shoved-in character-shaping device that may work on the literary page, but lacks the drama to translate onscreen. She’s a character who speaks her subtext rather than lives it, but there isn’t much of the former. Her slatternly wiles keep the island’s men buzzing back like flies, often to Sofia’s burning, petulant jealousy.
That these women say “I love you” to each other after just a few days of acquaintance is the most realistic aspect of this lesbian love story in theory, but it makes for a parched narrative in need of more serious heat.
That’s not to say “Hot Milk” doesn’t have its evocative moments, fashioning itself as one of those ennui-dappled vacation nightmares where everyone oozes spiritual turpitude and the hunger for something wicked to shoot them out of their lethargy. Jellyfish scrape along the sea floor like spindly mushroom clouds of portent, stinging Sofia who masochistically (and in a way that carries over to her actual human relationships) keeps going back for another dip.
Here is a world where carcasses sizzle on the grill, insects whir around sweat-glistening flesh, and pills are strewn on the table, as Rose begins imbibing a cocktail of mystery tablets prescribed to her by Gómez. He takes a psychoanalytic approach to parsing the root of Rose’s illness, grilling her about her childhood and Sofia’s absent father who, years ago, went looking for God and instead found Greece.
When Sofia eventually drives to Greece (without a license, but she’ll be damned if you tell her she can’t drive) to abruptly reconnect with said father, it feels like a chapter of the book (or worse, the screenplay) was cut out, only underscoring how “Hot Milk” threatens to feel like half a movie, or the middle of one only. That Sofia is a lapsed anthropology student implies how she may be a canny observer of the human condition, but she’s barely able to read the room (or beachside shack, or hastily built love nest) when it comes to what the people around her expect or want from her. She doesn’t speak any of the local languages, and self-destructively puts too many eggs of hope in the Ingrid basket, as the polyamorous Ingrid isn’t interested in a commitment.
There are a lot of rushed reckonings of the past — Sofia quizzing Ingrid about the decades-back trauma that plagues her, or putting the screws on Rose over what a potentially shitty mother she was and is — that don’t cohere in a 90-minute feature. Mackey doesn’t exactly sell these come-to-Jesus emotional awakenings, either, though it’s less her fault than that of a screenplay that feels too text-bound, without the visual wit to match the prose, like when Ingrid likens Sofia to a “blue planet with two dark eyes.” “I’m not any of those things,” Sofia replies. But what does that mean?
“Hot Milk” dribbles when it should feel crisper, less torpid, but that’s perhaps to match the inner decay of everyone onscreen, and the metastasis of the most interminable vacation ever known. The film lurches toward what could’ve been a great ending, the crisis of mother and daughter finally snapping into sharp and life-threatening focus, but instead leaves us hanging in the middle of the last sentence. “Hot Milk” confuses ambiguity for profundity, and it’s hard to vibe with a final scream that smash-cuts to black when all the moments proceeding it want to be omnipotent in the classic literary sense, motioning from perspective to perspective. There’s a ‘60s arthouse movie in here somewhere, but “Hot Milk” instead relies on those films’ most tiresome and outmoded tendencies. Perhaps we, as audiences, have outgrown the stench of ennui, too.
Grade: C
“Hot Milk” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. IFC Films will release it later this year.
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