Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut Hot Milk (premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival) opens with a quote from artist Louise Bourgeois that captures perfectly its disquieting and enigmatic tone: “I’ve been to hell and back. And let me tell you it was wonderful.”
This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures. The film, adapted from Deborah Levy’s bestselling novel, seems at first like a rite of passage story. But there are comic moments, too, then sudden explosions of violence, surreal interludes, and even bits of sapphic summer romance.
Sex Education star Emma Mackey plays Sofia, a beautiful young anthropology student who has accompanied her wheelchair-bound mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) to Almeria in Spain. They’re not there on holiday. Rose has mortgaged the house to pay for treatment from a healer, Gómez (Vincent Perez). Strangely, she is at times able to walk – but then she’ll immediately retreat back to her wheelchair. Her physical ailments have their roots in past trauma in her private life.
Whenever she can get away from her mother, who keeps her on a tight leash, Sofia spends her time moping up and down the beach, chain-smoking. That’s where she encounters the mysterious seamstress Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), an improbably glamorous figure who rides by on horseback and cadges cigarettes from her. They soon begin an affair.
Mackey is exceptional in a role originally earmarked for Jessie Buckley (who had to drop out because of a scheduling clash). As the troubled young anti-heroine, she combines surliness with vulnerability. She is an aloof figure who says very little and ignores the old men wolf-whistling at her. We always have the sense that her mind is whirring away on overdrive. She has been reading the work of Margaret Mead, an American academic famous for travelling to the South Pacific to study adolescence, and for attempting to discover whether its germ-filled miseries are universal or caused by external factors.
Mackey’s Sofia takes an equally analytic approach to human relationships. She is trying very hard to work out just why everyone around her is acting in such a strange and manipulative way. All the characters here seem to be either harbouring grudges or keeping secrets, even the freewheeling, convention-defying Ingrid, who suddenly blurts out that she once killed someone.
Lenkiewicz’s credits as a screenwriter include everything from TV’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl to the Oscar-winning Polish drama Ida (2013), about a young woman soon to become a nun. As a director, her approach is low key but probing. She concentrates on the faces of her characters, observing the most minute changes in look and behaviour. Just occasionally, there will be a dramatic visual flourish: dream-like shots of Sofia on a wheelchair underwater, or of her reacting to a jellyfish sting, or the deliberately melodramatic scene when Ingrid is first seen riding across the beach. There is a tremendous set-piece that sees Sofia suddenly give vent to her suppressed feelings of rage and go after the next-door neighbour with a fish knife, as if she is Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
With all of that in mind, Hot Milk’s sensibility is far closer to that of European filmmakers such as Poor Things’s Yorgos Lanthimos and Jessica Hausner (director of the strange Ben Whishaw sci-fi Little Joe) than to anything conventionally realist and British. This is an oblique and oddball movie but a rewarding one, full of dark humour and telling insights into its emotionally damaged protagonists and the bitter games they play with one another.
Dir: Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Starring: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez, Patsy Ferran. 92 mins.
‘Hot Milk’ is a world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, and will be released in UK cinemas on 30 May
