Sex Education star Emma Mackey plays Sofia, a beautiful young anthropology student who has accompanied her wheelchair-bound mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) to Almeria in Spain.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut Hot Milk (premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival) opens with a quote from artist Louise Bourgeois that captures perfectly its disquieting and enigmatic tone: “I’ve been to hell and back.
With all of that in mind, Hot Milk’s sensibility is far closer to that of European filmmakers such as Poor Things’s Yorgos Lanthoimos and Jessica Hausner (director of the strange Ben Whishaw sci-fi Little Joe) than to anything conventionally realist and British.
Just occasionally, there will be a dramatic visual flourish: dream-like shots of Sofia on a wheelchair underwater, or of her reacting to a jellyfish sting, or the deliberately melodramatic scene when Ingrid is first seen riding across the beach.
Lenkiewicz’s credits as a screenwriter include everything from TV’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl to the Oscar-winning Polish drama Ida (2013), about a young woman soon to become a nun.
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