In a curiously telling transfer, Scorching Milk, tailored from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Booker-shortlisted novel, opens not with the novel’s quote from Hélène Cixous – ‘It’s as much as you to interrupt the outdated circuits’ – however with an epigraph from artist Louise Bourgeois: ‘I’ve been to hell and again. And let me inform you, it was great.’ The place the movie may have been a searing portrait of a younger girl attempting to interrupt a cycle of matrilineal trauma, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut takes such liberties with its supply materials that any sense of this will get misplaced. Just like the medusa jellyfish populating the Spanish shoreline, Scorching Milk drifts aimlessly.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Mubi)
Sofia Papastergiadis (Emma Mackey) is a wounded twenty-something anthropology scholar accompanying her paralysed mom Rose (Fiona Shaw) to a mysterious clinic in Almería. Dr Gómez (Vincent Perez), who runs it, provides no diagnoses – solely cryptic pronouncements and unusual therapies. Sofia drifts right into a romance with Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), a German seamstress with a darkish secret, and briefly flirts with lifeguard Juan, whose cameo is so quick he wasn’t billed within the Berlinale or BFI Flare programmes. The place Levy’s novel lingers on erotic rigidity – ‘I used to be flesh thirst need mud blood lips cracking ft blistered knees skinned hips bruised,’ Sofia tells us – the movie strikes too quick to register the identical depth. Ingrid’s different lovers are talked about, however Sofia’s causes for tolerating them are left imprecise. So too is the motivation behind her emotional shifts, and gone is the novel’s voiceover and elliptical narration.
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But it surely takes a sharper script to convey the plot’s Freudian drama with out them. Whereas Sofia’s love for her ‘mom is like an axe. It cuts very deep’, we see little of this within the movie. Shaw is tragically wasted as Rose, diminished to a wailing caricature at occasions. No marvel Sofia loses her mood – it’s only a disgrace these scenes are so abrupt that they learn extra comedian than dramatic.
Nonetheless, there are moments of magnificence. When the tempo slows, the movie captures one thing of Levy’s dreamlike prose. Lenkiewicz’s visuals – sun-bleached and unusual – are underscored by an eerie soundtrack. Because the summer season warmth intensifies, so does the stress between mom and daughter.
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Although Lenkiewicz depends closely on subtext over story, she comes near redeeming herself close to the tip. The ultimate scene gestures towards an evidence for Rose’s trauma-induced hypochondria – her personal mom’s time in a Magdalene Laundry – earlier than ending on a cliffhanger the novel strikes past. If solely Lenkiewicz had given this second the gravity it deserves. Because it stands, Scorching Milk stays an enigmatic, often stunning movie – however one which finally struggles to interrupt the outdated circuits of trauma it seeks to look at.
Scorching Milk is launched on 4 July 2025, mubi.com
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Mubi)
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Mubi)
Supply: Wallpaper
