Hot Milk – Film Review

In Hot Milk, writer-director Rebecca Lenkiewicz attempts to adapt Deborah Levy’s complex and elliptical 2016 novel into a sun-drenched meditation on illness, freedom, and identity. While the source material offered a lyrical and psychologically layered narrative, the film struggles to capture its internal tension and drifting surrealism, resulting in a drama that’s visually hypnotic but emotionally tepid. Despite a strong lead performance from Emma Mackey and gorgeously immersive cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt and Si Bell, Hot Milk rarely rises above its fragmented storytelling and sluggish pacing.

The story follows Sofia (Emma Mackey), a young anthropologist in her mid-twenties, who accompanies her ailing mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) to Almería, a parched coastal town in southern Spain. Rose is afflicted with an ambiguous illness that leaves her unable to walk, though her condition fluctuates with inexplicable inconsistency. Their destination: the controversial Dr. Gomez (Vincent Perez), a physician of vague credibility and spiritual affectations, who promises clarity but offers more riddles than answers.

While Rose submits to Gomez’s cryptic methods, Sofia, long emotionally shackled by her mother’s dependency, begins to awaken. She drifts into an entanglement with the seductive Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), a German expatriate who floats through life with aloof confidence and magnetism. Ingrid becomes the catalyst for Sofia’s unraveling — or perhaps her rebirth — as she embarks on a series of impulsive, destabilizing decisions that further widen the rift between herself and her mother.

The premise brims with potential: the mother-daughter dynamic, the unreliable body, the quest for autonomy, and the blurring of medical science with spiritual charlatanism. Yet, on screen, these themes feel flattened, as if Lenkiewicz is unsure how to translate Levy’s internalized prose into cinematic language. The film substitutes narrative propulsion with hazy ambiguity, but without the psychological nuance necessary to keep it compelling.

One of the film’s more admirable qualities is its aesthetic. Blauvelt and Bell’s cinematography is rich with texture and color, evoking the oppressive heat and hallucinatory stillness of Almería. The landscape itself becomes a character — dry, sun-scorched, and indifferent, mirroring Sofia’s emotional detachment and longing. There’s a painterly attention to composition, with warm earth tones and golden hour lighting suffusing nearly every frame. Whether it’s the glimmer of sunlight off the Mediterranean or the dust in the air of a rural clinic, the visual palette is nothing short of intoxicating.

Equally commendable is Emma Mackey’s lead performance. She brings a subtle intensity to Sofia — a character both brittle and yearning. Mackey carefully navigates Sofia’s internal contradictions: her resentment toward Rose, her hunger for release, and her tendency toward self-sabotage. It’s a performance rooted in observation, often working in silence, with a gaze that’s both searching and wary. In a film that’s otherwise emotionally muffled, Mackey provides its most vivid notes of life.

Unfortunately, those glimmers of promise are drowned out by the film’s languid pace and muddled tone. Lenkiewicz seems hesitant to commit to either psychological realism or dreamlike abstraction, leaving the narrative stranded in a liminal space where nothing fully resonates. Moments that should be haunting or revelatory — like Sofia stinging herself on jellyfish or watching Ingrid disappear into the ocean — feel inert rather than symbolic. There’s a lethargy to the storytelling, and its elliptical structure grows repetitive rather than hypnotic.

Fiona Shaw, a seasoned performer capable of imbuing even the flattest roles with depth, is unfortunately underused here. Rose is a fascinating character on the page — manipulative yet vulnerable, cunning yet frail — but on screen, she often feels like a narrative device rather than a fully realized person. Her interactions with Sofia are strained but not especially illuminating, and their emotional entanglement, which should serve as the film’s central axis, never achieves the complexity it promises.

Vicky Krieps, as the enigmatic Ingrid, similarly suffers from the script’s opacity. Though she has the charisma to play a romantic cipher, the character’s motives and allure are so vaguely drawn that her impact on Sofia feels more theoretical than earned. The same goes for Dr. Gomez, who veers too far into caricature to be taken seriously as a healer or a fraud, and whose interactions with Rose and Sofia verge on melodrama without thematic payoff.

The screenplay, also penned by Lenkiewicz, is filled with hushed conversations, philosophical musings, and elliptical exchanges that echo Levy’s literary style — but in doing so, it often feels more like a summary of the novel than a cinematic experience in its own right. The dialogue is sparse, sometimes pretentious, and rarely incisive. Character development is often told rather than shown, and even Sofia’s arc — from passive daughter to liberated self — feels more like a concept than an emotional journey.

The film’s exploration of psychosomatic illness and the blurry line between physical and psychological suffering is undercut by its lack of narrative clarity. There’s little insight into Rose’s condition beyond vague gestures at repression and control. The themes of maternal manipulation, bodily agency, and identity are all present but scattered, like puzzle pieces from different boxes.

Even at a relatively modest runtime, Hot Milk feels stretched thin, its slow rhythms bordering on soporific. It’s a film that clearly aspires to something sensual and cerebral — an existential slow burn in the vein of The Lost Daughter or Call Me by Your Name — but it lacks the emotional backbone or narrative cohesion to sustain those ambitions. Its symbolism feels labored rather than illuminating, and its characters remain frustratingly elusive.

Hot Milk is a film of surfaces: gorgeous to look at, intermittently intriguing, but emotionally undercooked. Lenkiewicz’s vision is sincere, and the film is far from a disaster, but it fails to capture the hypnotic interiority of Levy’s novel. For all its visual splendor and a committed performance from Emma Mackey, it too often feels like a mirage — alluring at a distance, but ultimately insubstantial.