Hot Milk
Fiona Shaw is excellent, but there's little else to recommend in this limp adaptation of Deborah Levy's 2016 novel
The overbearing mother and the sullen, stoic daughter relationship is ripe territory for cinema, from Terms of Endearment to Mermaids to Joanna Hogg's more recent example of the subgenre, The Eternal Daughter. But in acclaimed playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz‘s hands, Deborah Levy’s eponymous novel is less of a sun-struck examination of power dynamics between women and more of a soggy sizzle, a limp beach towel of a film.
Sophie (Emma Mackey, who is all silently steel surface with no substance) is in Spain with her ailing mother (Fiona Shaw, who is excellent at playing frazzled and demanding) to find a cure for her litany of health problems. Like the best summer memories of lust and love, there are clothes drenched with sweat, longing and wet from swimming in the windswept sea, and meet-cutes over cigarettes under the bleached sun. German Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) arrives like a mirage, a beautiful, exotically older mädchen not in uniform but throwing her boots into the sea and rolling her own fags. Sophie is spellbound, but Ingrid is just another one of those tired romantic movie tropes: the manic pixie dream girl, who replies with lines like “Red shoes. A bicycle. A cat” when asked about her childhood.
Sometimes the best holiday memories don’t age well, but curdle like spoiled milk – the same goes for book-to-screen adaptations.
Released 4 Jul by MUBI; certificate 15