In the sultry and slightly stir-crazy mind game that is “Hot Milk,” something’s the matter with Rose’s legs. The elderly single mom, played with an irritable, bone-deep bitterness by Irish actor Fiona Shaw, has spent the past few years paralyzed by an illness no one can diagnose. She’s seen multiple doctors, whose best guess is that it’s psychosomatic, something to do with a distant trauma she refuses to confront. The film, which director Rebecca Lenkiewicz has elliptically adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel, seems less interested in finding a cure for Rose’s condition than in preventing its spread.
Like the book (but lacking its easy stream-of-consciousness style), “Hot Milk” is told from the perspective of Rose’s daughter, the dutiful — and beautiful — mid-20s Sofia (Emma Mackey), who put her anthropology studies on hold in order to accompany her mother to Spain, where a healer named Gomez (Vincent Perez) is trying a more holistic approach. This trip is hardly a vacation, though Sofia makes the most of their cottage near the sea to swim (among poisonous jellyfish) and explore (with the similarly ephemeral and no less dangerous Ingrid, seductively played by Vicky Krieps).
Still, it’s her wheelchair-dependent mother who dominates her days, grating against her like so much coarse sand caught in her swimsuit. When not asking Sofia to arrange this or that excursion, the elderly woman — whom Shaw portrays as a human gargoyle, scowling through her anguish — whines about the insects and the heat and her daughter’s perceived lack of ambition. She dismisses Sofia as a “permanent student” without realizing this self-inflicted codependency is her own creation. No wonder the young woman is full of resentment. We feel it too.
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“Hot Milk” is one of those films that feels like a tortured scream held deep inside, just waiting to burst free. The film channels whatever force is responsible for crippling Rose, but also the needy, suffocating influence she holds over Sofia. For first-time helmer Lenkiewicz (who co-wrote “Ida” and “She Said,” now making her debut behind the camera), this complicated mother-daughter dynamic serves as the center of gravity for the film. For audiences, however, it’s the disruptive magnetic force that pulls Sofia away from everything she ought to be doing with her time in Spain, dominating even a side trip to Greece, where her estranged father (Vangelis Mourikis) offers disconcerting insights.
Mackey, who plays the young woman, has a sharp, precociously severe profile, like a young Uma Thurman or movie-star scion Chiara Mastroianni, who inherited her dad’s sharp cheekbones and the wide, doll-like eyes of her mom (Catherine Deneuve). In principle, it’s a face sufficiently enigmatic to carry a movie, and yet, the character herself is sketched a bit too thinly to sustain the short 93-minute running time, mostly because Lenkiewicz fails to establish what this character wants.
Is it independence from her chronically unhappy mother? Does the erotic dynamic between her and Ingrid — the source of little pleasure and much jealousy — represent a genuine desire, or merely a different woman for her to obsess over and heal? The film never explicitly reveals what the cause of Rose’s paralysis is, though it diagnoses an equivalent blockage in Ingrid, who can’t forgive herself for a childhood tragedy. (Krieps captures the liberated side of Ingrid, who’s more interesting before confessing what ails her.)
Sofia’s been writing her anthopology thesis on Margaret Mead, whose observation that human nature is flexible but also elastic could be the film’s thesis, though it would be more apt (but perhaps too obvious) if she were studying psychology instead. For some, the ambiguities of “Hot Milk” will surely leave room to identify with and personalize Sofia’s experience, though they seem far more likely to frustrate.
The film unfolds in a dreamy, liminal place in Sofia’s personal evolution, but lacks the tangible sense of vicariously experiencing it ourselves — a shame, since it’s a splendid location in which to be doing such intensive self-healing. The way “Hot Milk” was assembled (by “Love Lies Bleeding” editor Mark Towns), it’s all but impossible to keep track of how much time has slipped by between scenes. Meanwhile, there’s little sense that the characters’ lives continue when they’re off-camera … and almost no way to conclusively say what happens after the startling last scene, when the film abruptly cuts to black.
Looking back from this scene, with its “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”-like shock value, it’s fair to conclude that “Hot Milk” has been a study in breaking certain cycles and refusing to give in to trauma. Levy and Lenkiewicz preach a toughen-up approach, which flies in the face of where the younger generation seems to find itself at this moment: embracing victimhood and crying fragility. After indulging Sofia’s indolence for the better part of its running time, the movie suddenly supports her newfound sense of independence. Whatever her mother’s fate, Sofia must learn to stand on her own two legs.