Hot Milk, Rebecca Lenkiewicz (2025)6 Images
The stories of women enchant Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Her career, spanning film, TV and radio, has explored the multifaceted nature of womanhood, and her directorial debut, Hot Milk, is no exception. The sun-soaked film tackles the mother-daughter connection, disability and queer romance with fierce tenacity and tension.
An adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Booker Prize-nominated 2016 novel, Hot Milk is centred on the combative mother-daughter relationship between defiant Rose (Fiona Shaw) and “permanent student of anthropology” Sofia (Emma Mackey). Under the scorching Spanish sun, the coming-of-age narrative follows Sofia as she accompanies her mother to the coast in search of a cure for the mysterious illness paralysing Rose, which has left her in a wheelchair. The pair have a rocky relationship, a tension that hangs heavy in the air whenever they are in each other’s company. Sofia roams the island to escape her mother’s control, and it’s here she meets the whimsical Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), a German seamstress who rides into frame on a horse with the spirit of a beachside bohemian.
Lenkiewicz’s first writer-director venture follows her writer credits on Disobedience, Colette and She Said. However, with Hot Milk, her feelings towards the film’s release are different, as she has been involved in the project from start to finish for over seven years. “I think there’ll be a certain euphoria and a certain kind of loss,” Lenkiewicz says of Hot Milk’s release. “It’s like you’ve been doing everything you can do for this pseudo-child, and then they’re gone.”
Ahead of the film’s release, we sat down with Lenkiewicz to discuss making her directorial debut, working with her stellar cast, and her reasoning behind the adaptation changes.
My first thought when I heard Hot Milk was being made into a film was the challenge of adapting the rich interior lives of Deborah Levy’s characters. What was your starting point for this project?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: I read it simply to adapt it and thought, ‘I must direct it.’ I told [producer] Christine Langan that I would only adapt it if I could direct it, and she took a leap of faith. I read the book once, and went with it, rather than a military operation of rereading. When I went back to the book, I was surprised at the difference between the two. The book was so deeply cinematic. At one point, I thought, ‘Do I have a voiceover?’ Because Sofia is commenting on everything. In the book, there are small passages where she is watched. Deborah said she imagined that was Ingrid, so I thought, let’s be that watcher, watch her evolve and explode.
Did your adaptation process change with the added role of director?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: It did. I had to abandon ship because I wrote knowing that I was directing. Then, when I read the script, it was quite boring because I was making it easy to direct. There was a fear in me about the practicality of directing. Normally, I write something and think, ‘that’s the director’s problem to get to that location,’ or ‘they’ll know how to interpret this stage direction.’ So I had to consciously forget that I was directing and just write.
The film is a portrait of womanhood led by an incredible trio of actors. What did your involvement in the casting look like?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: Deborah knew Fiona, and we all thought that she would be amazing. Fiona immediately said yes. I went to her house, dissected the script and talked about the relationships and family. It was a lovely, organic process of translating Fiona into Rose. There were simple things: in the book, she’s from Yorkshire, and I said, let’s just make her Irish. I love Fiona’s Irishness.
Finding Sofia was harder. I thought of Emma Mackey because I’d watched Sex Education. [We met] and I was trying to be very professional. Two minutes in, I said: ‘I really want you to do this, you’d be an amazing Sofia.’ She just smiled and said, ‘I’d love to do it.’ It was really hard to raise the money, but because all actors were coming on board, I felt more forward movement. I just thought I can’t let anyone down, we have to make this film.
So much of Shaw and Mackey’s performance is in the unspoken. How was it for you to direct those sorts of performances, which are tricky to achieve when translating the book’s rich interiority?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: Emma was very forensic about her temperature in each scene. As soon as they met, there was chemistry. Fiona stayed in the wheelchair all day long, and Emma would wheel her everywhere. There were a lot of conversations about the geography of a conversation, instead of head-to-head, turned away from each other. It’s a statement in itself of how long you’ve lived together and the subtext. They were very generous actors and had to contain their warmth for the tension between them.
The film also devotes plenty of time to the queer romance between Sofia and Ingrid. How was it to bring that element of Sofia to life?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: Sofia grows up with one parent and the love is not unconditional; it’s contractual. My feeling was that if you’re brought up in that way, and you find someone to love, can you break open your ribcage and love? Has Sofia ever done that before? I don’t think she has. As soon as she sees Ingrid on the beach, she’s alive. It’s the ultimate fantasy for Sofia.
Then, Ingrid is very fluid with her love, but her sexuality is almost distracting her from her trauma. For me, the love they have is very real and beautiful. That’s another reason I wanted to direct it: I didn’t want it to feel like a cliché. I wanted it to be profound and nuanced in how they were together and how they touched. We had an intimacy coordinator, which is always great, but Emma and Vicky flew. Vicky would smile and say, ‘I’ll think of something.’
Sofia grows up with one parent and the love is not unconditional; it’s contractual. My feeling was that if you’re brought up in that way, and you find someone to love, can you break open your ribcage and love?
Their chemistry is fantastic. Their intimacy is also beautifully shot with tactile close-ups of skin. What influenced the imagery of those intimate scenes?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: I looked at a lot of beautiful lesbian photography from the 1970s and Bill Brandt’s photos of bodies in space. I wanted it to feel abstract. [Cinematographer] Christopher Blauvelt would go rogue in a beautiful way, filming hands and faces to feel the sensuality of it. Emma and Vicki were so incredibly open to anything and everything. I wanted any young queer woman watching feel like there was this wonderful happening.
Hot Milk also spotlights the relationship between Rose’s disability and Sofia as a caregiver. In the film, you identify Rose’s condition, while in the book it remains a mystery. Why did you decide to identify it to depict it?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: Fiona and I felt that it was good to ground it in some way. [Researching] the condition, FND [Functional Neurological Disorder], we talked to people who had the condition, learning just how hard their lives were, paralysed in bed and unable to look after children or their relationships fell apart. Also, Fiona felt that she couldn’t play the character until the physicality was there. We had a brilliant movement director from when I was at drama school 30 years ago, Vanessa Yuen, who spent a day with Fiona talking about how pain translates.
Something striking was the visual brightness of this narrative of disability. I think we’re used to seeing portrayals of disability with melancholic, grey visuals. Can you describe your approach to visual framing when it comes to disability?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: It’s very important that they’re in a different location for a miracle cure. But I didn’t want it to feel like a picture postcard: you’ve got wind, sun, and all these energies that are not urban. Even in the inviting sea, you’ve got dangerous creatures, the jellyfish, that Sofia is attracted to. The place seems liberating, but there’s tension. Things aren’t quite what they seem and these three women are not as one thinks. They’re not as they present: Rose, the pleasant, interested woman, is actually this wild and feral spirit. Sofia is quiet, but she’s a lion, and Ingrid is a free spirit who’s incredibly trapped.
The book opens with a Hélène Cixous quote [‘It’s up to you to break the old circuits’], but your film opens with a quote from Louise Bourgeois [‘I’ve been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful’]. What did the Bourgeois quote mean to you?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: I thought it’d be nice to set [Bourgeois] up at the beginning, because Sofia watches a video of her later. I love that quote; we go through hell, but if someone asked us, we would do it all again. For me, this film is about how resilient women are. Making that film was hellish in many ways, but I see it as an absolute heaven and one of the most incredible times of my life. But I also sweat at how horrific some of it was, in terms of pressure or time.
Without spoilers, I wanted to discuss the ending, as you depart from the book’s conclusion and make the events a lot more ambiguous. What informed that decision?
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: In the script, there was a much more definite, hopeful ending. [But] the ending is hopeful. I think that Sofia is gifting her mother, that they both have gifts, and they both fly in some way. That’s my interpretation. But, for instance, Fiona has seen it twice, and each time she thought it was a different ending, even though she played the character.
When I watched it, everyone was holding their breath when the screen went black. Then the credits roll and there’s an exhale.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz: I had a clever beginning which spoke about the ending, but it all felt too artificial in the end. To me, this is a raw film, so let’s keep it raw.
Hot Milk is in UK cinemas on July 4.
