THE STORY – Set in the scorching heat of a Spanish summer, the film follows Rose and her daughter Sofia as they travel to the seaside town of Almería to consult Gómez, an enigmatic healer who may hold the key to Rose’s mysterious illness. But in the sun-drenched town, Sofia, trapped until now by her mother’s condition, begins to shed her inhibitions as she is drawn to the magnetic charms of a free-spirited traveler, Ingrid.
THE CAST – Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez & Patsy Ferran
THE TEAM – Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
British writer and actress Rebecca Lenkiewicz (“Ida,” “Disobedience,” and “She Said“) makes her directorial debut with this adaptation of the 2016 novel by British author Deborah Levy. Screening in competition at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival, it’s a slow-building drama that simmers with uneasy tension with a tremendous cast who, despite their talents, can’t overcome the film’s shortcomings.
Emma Mackey (“Sex Education”) plays Sofia, a young woman in her twenties, who accompanies her overbearing, wheelchair-bound mother, Rose (Fiona Shaw), to a Spanish seaside town in the hopes that enigmatic healer Gomez (Vincent Perez) might be able to find a cure for her mysterious illness. Specifically, Rose claims she has a bone condition that leaves her unable to walk, but her mobility apparently comes and goes without reason. So, is it all in her head? Meanwhile, Sofia, who’s already aching for her freedom after putting her own life on hold to play nursemaid to her mother, finds an unexpected source of comfort when she begins an affair with Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), an alluring woman she meets on the beach, after she literally rides in on horseback, like something out of a fairytale. However, Ingrid has secrets of her own.
Lenkiewicz, who also wrote the script, adopts a drip-feed approach to the story, so the finer details of Sofia and Rose’s relationship are only gradually revealed. In particular, it’s strongly hinted that a traumatic incident in the past may be responsible for Rose’s condition in the first place, a revelation that’s blatantly obvious to the audience but hasn’t occurred to any of the characters. On a similar note, it seems strangely inconsistent that Rose is paying Gomez a large amount of money for his apparent specialist knowledge, and all we ever see of him suggests is what you would expect from a common or garden psychiatrist.
Sofia’s is the most compelling of the two main storylines, as it takes an intriguing trajectory. Initially, it seems her burgeoning relationship with Ingrid will perhaps provide her with the emotional connection she doesn’t seem to have with her mother, but when Ingrid proves less than satisfactory as a romantic partner, Sofia’s already simmering anger approaches boiling point, prefaced with an amusing act of petulance that gets provides a welcome injection of laughter.
Mackey is great at scowling, and a large part of the film consists of her angrily stomping from place to place while sporting a fetching pout and wearing flimsy summer dresses. To that end, her anger is nicely calibrated throughout, to the point where it feels like several years of pent-up teenage frustration being vented at once. Lenkiewicz’s control of the tension is such that the cathartic nature of the explosion is palpable. Shaw is equally good at dealing with her own levels of repressed anger. Her performance is simultaneously heartbreaking and infuriating, ensuring that the audience fully understands and sympathizes with Sofia’s point of view.
However, a miscast Vicky Krieps is slightly disappointing as Ingrid, and it is unclear how much of that is down to the script (which ultimately needs her character to be flakey and capricious) and how much is down to her portrayal. Either way, the relationship between her and Sofia lacks chemistry and fails to convince the audience of their connection on an emotional level, meaning that crucial plot elements don’t effectively land as intended. Krieps isn’t the film’s only casting wobble – Perez is French, yet he’s playing a Spanish man for some reason (were no Spanish actors available?), and his accent is all over the place as a result. The weirdness of it is further underscored by the fact that Patsy Farran (a Spanish actress) plays Gomez’s daughter, Julieta, and the contrast is painfully apparent. Somewhat amusingly, the film’s tendency to mix up nationalities also extends to the location work as the story is set explicitly in Almeria, Spain, but it was actually shot in Greece.
In fairness, the story builds to a terrific ending, but the film does a lot of treading water to get there, and there is a baffling lack of narrative progression for the most part. Ultimately, “Hot Milk” is a bit too obtuse for its own good – speaking at a Berlin press conference, the filmmakers explicitly confirmed that they wanted audiences to dig out the film’s themes and ideas for themselves, but Lenkiewicz’s intended message is arguably lost as a result.
