Simply find the best possible online shopping Hot Milk deals
Shop Hot Milk products and compare prices and listings on popular online marketplaces.
Note: This review was originally published as part of our Berlinale 2025 coverage. Hot Milk opens in theaters on June 27.
A mother-daughter relationship is rarely a love story, at least not in any of the ways art has dramatized it thus far. Sure, a mother loves her daughter deeply (and vice-versa), but it is a sentiment defined by ambivalence and often laced with resentment. British writer Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk speaks to the very core of that ambivalence; seasoned screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, She Said) has now adapted the acclaimed book into her first foray as a director. Set during a hot and heavy summer in Almería on the southeastern coast of Spain, the blistering Hot Milk follows 25-year-old Sofia (Emma Mackey) and her partially paralyzed mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) as they navigate everyday ailing and maternal traumas, always together and somehow always apart.
“My mom stopped walking when I was four,” Sofia tells the unconventional healer Dr. Gómez (Vincent Perez), who is the reason for their Spanish trip. Rose suffers from a mysterious illness that eludes diagnosticians; her daughter’s passivity tells us this has been going on forever, effectively trapping her in a carer…
When Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) glides up to Sofia (Emma Mackey) on horseback like a manic-pixie mirage, Sofia immediately allured, or when Ingrid tells Sofia, “Do you have cigarettes? OK, let’s go,” even though they’ve just met, you want to believe they’re riding on some hidden code of desire, psychically linked strangers sun-baking on the Iberian peninsula of Spain. Ingrid, a German expat styled in a flowy headscarf like a breezy lesbian pirate or swashbuckling bar wench, is such a void of a woman in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut “Hot Milk” that this study of sapphic malaise along the Mediterranean becomes oddly sizzle-less.
Adapting Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel, whose title unsubtly conjures images of breastfeeding among other bodily activities related to reproduction, the “She Said” and “Disobedience” screenwriter casts Mackey and Krieps as lovers among the ruins of Fiona Shaw’s distress. The great Irish actress plays Rose, Sofia’s mother, who has schlepped her daughter to the coastal town of Almería, Spain, to locate a cure for Rose’s mysterious bone disease, which has left her unable to walk since Sofia (now in her mid-twenties) was four. Or has it, and is Rose faking it?
More from IndieWire
…