Hot Milk: Fiona Shaw is a spiky delight in this atmospheric but unsatisfying Deborah Levy adaptation

• Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Over the past decade, screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz has carved out a reputation for cerebral, literary stories built around female dissatisfaction and rebellion. In films such as Disobedience (2017, co-written with director Sebastián Lelio), She Said (2022, directed by Maria Schrader) and Ida (2013, an Oscar-winning collaboration with Paweł Pawlikowski), Lenkiewicz presents complex heroines pushing against received wisdom and hidden truths. So it tracks that for her directorial debut, Lenkiewicz has chosen to adapt Hot Milk, a typically spiky novel from Deborah Levy, another writer whose work is often powered by the engine of simmering female discontent. 

If Lenkiewicz’s previous films have frequently depicted women trapped in closed worlds – the orthodox Jewish community, the Hollywood boy’s club, communist Poland – then Hot Milk offers a dark twist on that formula, presenting instead the tangled dynamics of three women imprisoned by their own psyches. Sofia (Emma Mackey), is a twenty-something failed anthropology student who has travelled with her co-dependent mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) to a shabby Spanish seaside town in a last ditch attempt to cure Rose’s disabling chronic pain. 

As Rose undergoes expensive treatments with the mysterious Dr Gomez (Vincent Perez), an alternative healer operating out of a glass-walled clinic in a semi-industrial wasteland, Sofia spends her days wandering the stony beaches and swimming in the jellyfish-infested sea. A chance encounter with free-spirited seamstress Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) sparks a passionate affair, awakening Sofia’s repressed dreams of a more independent life. But it soon becomes clear that Sofia’s apparently liberated new lover has her own troubling family history, and that perhaps Rose and Ingrid have more in common than it first appears. 

Adapting literary fiction for the cinema is a fraught enterprise. The heavy symbolism, mythological allusions and deep interiority which give Levy’s novel its deceptive power are not easy to bring to the screen. Despite her clear affinity with the material, Lenkiewicz never quite manages to translate Sofia’s internal struggle into the visual, leaving Mackey stuck with a lot of heavy browed stomping across shingle. Subsequently, when Sofia’s long suffering composure breaks, in moments of unpredictable destruction, these explosions feel abrupt. Meanwhile, without the mediation of a wry authorial voice, the normally excellent Krieps is left with a character who veers worryingly close to manic pixie cliché, horse riding, head scarf and all.  

As the film’s most vocal character, Shaw’s Rose fares better, oscillating with black humour between barbed insults and morose self-pity. Though Shaw gets all the best lines (and savours them), Hot Milk feels suspended in a constant state of anticipation, never quite reaching the release we – and the wrung out characters – crave. Like the half-built apartments Sofia walks past on her daily trips to the beach, the film feels somehow incomplete, the shell of something promising, left unfinished.