It is no great compliment to say that Hot Milk makes a successful case for Emma Mackey’s physical charms. One of the break-out stars of Netflix’s Sex Education, she has moody features and an instinctive gravitas that has elevated her in everything from Emily Brontë drama Emily to Barbie. This film fails to tap into those inner depths.
That frustration is compounded by the credentials of longtime screenwriter/first-time feature director, Rebecca Lenkiewicz. With uncompromising arthouse writing credits such as Ida and Disobedience to her name, she also holds the status of first woman to have a play staged in the NT Olivier. Despite all of this, she makes an error common to literary adaptations by prioritising loyalty to the source material over a cinematic reimagining of the same – this is Deborah Levy’s fragmentary, fever dream of a novel (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016).
This dream unfolds over a summer in the Spanish coastal city of Almeria. Here, aided by a lesbian tryst with a manic pixie dream girl (Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, arriving on horseback) 25-year-old Sofia (Mackey) has an animal awakening as she unshackles from her controlling, wheelchair-bound mother, Rose (a gutsy Fiona Shaw)
Rose has a nerve problem that may or may not be real. Sofia has paused her PhD in anthropology to accompany her in pursuit of a cure. This is the latest in two decades worth of fruitless treatments – and it may be the last. Rose has sold her cottage in England to afford the €25,000 price-tag of medical attention from Dr Gomez (Vincent Perez) at his mysterious clinic.
What’s missing is a device that grants us access to Sofia’s depths
That’s pretty much it for plot. Family backstory is woven in around loaded encounters whose significance washes in and out, like the tide. Every time Sofia goes swimming she is stung by medusa jellyfish. If that’s not enough natural symbolism, Sofia fantasies about freeing a chained dog that won’t stop barking. ‘I’d rather be dead than shackled, wouldn’t you?’ says one character, alluding to a core theme with all the subtlety of Sofia later smashing a plate.
Lenkiewicz earnestly replicates the micro-events in Levy’s book, as well as her strange and heightened dialogue. Lifting these wholesale without equivalent access to Sofia’s interior voice makes for a strained and unconvincing atmosphere. Thinly-sketched peripheral characters leave no impression, and by the time the riddle of Rose’s behaviour is filled in with historic context, the grating nature of the mother-daughter relationship has made it hard to care – a scene that is positioned as devastating sinks like a wheelchair in the water.
What’s missing is a device that grants us access to Sofia’s depths. As the hypnotised camera cleaves to its star’s physical form, we are locked into a dead-end state of looking at her, never out through her eyes at the living world.
In US theaters Jun 27 and UK cinemas Jul 4.