Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s “Hot Milk” (2025), an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s eponymous 2016 novel, is a slippery examination of secrets, selves we hide from others, identity shaded by buried lies. So much we know of the others lies behind layers of concealment and disguise. The film thrives in tension, both suspenseful and erotically laced.
Hot Milk (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The film opens in a town on the Spanish coastline. Sofia (Emma Mackey) has come to Almeria with her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) for the latter’s treatment of paralysis. Rose has been suffering for a while. Sofia saw her walk once when she was four. Rose’s condition has engulfed and eaten into pretty much all of Sofia’s life and studies. Wherever her mother has nudged her to follow, Sofia hasn’t wavered. The emotional, personal costs grow to loom over the course of the film, as the mood darkens and the stakes rise.
The director keeps the atmosphere elusive and erotically playful. So much is left unaddressed, unspoken, and left out of the cards. We fill in according to spare cues tossed by the occasionally bristling dynamic between Sofia and Rose. Even as the daughter doesn’t want to project resentment and mostly keeps her needs clipped, there are moments when she lashes out.
Mackey is terrific in conveying a sharply contained energy and anger. But the film is much too loose and floaty for its own good. It wafts without a strong matrix of interpellated events and characters who can render their decisions persuasive. The strong indulgence in creating an interior life distracts from a more even understanding of how characters dip in and out of realizations and heaviness.
One wonders why certain beats couldn’t have been more vividly sketched, resolutions and delineations patterned with cutting ache. The mother-daughter duo meets Dr. Gomez (Vincent Perez). Rose says she finds him promising and starts following his regimen. She’s almost too trusting of the new doctor, dispensing with her previous medications. Sofia suggests she could rethink before being so committed.
Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), riding on a horse, attracts the attention of Sofia. The latter is instantly arrested. She wants to resist, but cannot help herself being swayed to her. Ingrid oozes a strong sexual charm. She radiates the confidence of a woman who perfectly knows what she’s doing. Soon, the two begin a relationship. But it’s not a conventional one, by any degree.
The already isolated Sofia is conflicted and tumultuous as she finds Ingrid toying with a string of lovers. Sofia wants Ingrid all to herself, but the latter is more emancipated and moves through free love, without any hang-ups. At one point, Ingrid confesses to killing someone. It was her own sister. She says no more. Sofia recedes.
Tensions between Sofia and her mother escalate, with the former packing her bags and jetting off to meet her father, Christos, whom she hasn’t seen since she was little. Her father, who has remarried and has another child, insists to Sofia that she must ask her mother about her family, which is always shirked from discussions. Rose represses talk of it. The seething Sofia discovers from Dr. Gomez that her mother is planning to amputate her leg. She is furious and confronts her mother.
Hot Milk (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Rose survive?
Rose has made up her mind about leaving Spain. She insists Dr. Gomez is worthless and asks for a refund. She cannot endure any more pain and wants amputation. But her daughter won’t even hear of it. Sofia confronts her about what she has been hiding. In between, Sofia also discovers what actually happened to Ingrid’s sister. Both were children when Ingrid pushed her sister off a swing, and it turned far more dangerous than she expected. Her sister survived but remained intellectually stunted. She lives far away in a shelter home. Ingrid is guilt-stricken to this day about it.
Rose tells her daughter about her sister, Mary, who had disappeared before she was born. Apparently, their family had sent her away at sixteen. It could be the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, where Rose is originally from. But she says no more. Sofia, exhausted with her mother, makes her get out of the car. She leaves Rose in the wheelchair in the middle of the road.
She rails at her mother to embrace life, not endure it. Rose insists she cannot get up and walk away, but Sofia looks away, adamant in her belief that Rose can walk. The film ends, leaving us in the dark about whether Rose made it out. There have been ample hints of Rose’s illness being psychosomatic and her capability to walk away if it comes to situations of crisis. A more hopeful viewer would be inclined to believe Rose could walk away.
Hot Milk (2025) Movie Themes Explained:
Co-dependency, caregiving strains, and traumatic burdens
At the centre of the narrative is a mother-daughter relationship, bursting with neediness and thorny discomforts. The mother has made the daughter a crutch for her. Sofia is permanently guilt-stricken about leaving her mother when she explicitly needs someone to be around. She hangs back, tied to being the dutiful daughter. It’s a burden that wears her down, limits her opportunities. She had to defer her studies in anthropology because her mother is not very kind, describing it as Sofia’s failure. The daughter is met with the brunt of harsh judgment, even as she is unfailing in tending to every single thing Rose asks for on a sudden whim.
There are strains of toxicity in the bond, either of them flinching before naming it for what it is. Rose negates that there is cruelty in this equation, crushing her daughter. She might not say it out loud, but she’s driving her daughter to a lifetime of missed opportunities, prospects frozen over. Sofia chafes, but she’s mostly compliant. She didn’t have other support systems or family to help her up. As a result, she flails while nurturing her mother. Rose is unwilling to confront her past and family roots.
The doctor gauges she’s nursing some latent trauma and urges her to ease out of it and talk directly to it. But Rose deflects and evades, leaving Sofia to pick through the residues. The ambiguities are undercut by danger and hate rising from the edges. The mother and daughter clash and confront each other. Their emotional journey is one where both have to recognise the damage in the equation and start with positive growth. Sofia compels her mother to shed her reliance on trauma cycles and be more exultant and risk-embracing with life.
