The European set LGBTQ romance film has never been bigger since Luca Guadagnino made Call Me By Your Name, a sun-soaked romance that jumped off the screen in one of the most gorgeous places on Earth. Now in 2025 we have Hot Milk, a sweltering mash-mash of two utterly odd plots: Sofia (Emma Mackey) and her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) have come to Spain for some expensive pseudo-science treatment for Rose to walk again; and Sofia meets and falls in love with the rather mad Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), an older German woman dealing with her own past by smoking, riding horses, and flirting with everything that moves.

The main gripe for this film is the plot feels so jarring and just plain odd. There are lifelong issues between Sofia and Rose and a film always likes to make that immediately apparent when they make the child call their parent by their first name instead of ‘Mum’. Rose has some supposedly horrendous childhood trauma that is one of the reasons why her brain has made it so she can’t walk anymore (although when the trauma is unveiled, I don’t think it was quite dramatic enough to warrant this). As a result, Sofia has had to assume the caretaker role, holding her back in life and making her more and more aloof with the world. Character-wise I just don’t think there’s enough on the page for Emma Mackey to work with. She is trying her best with frowning and looking longingly at the ocean but the development doesn’t spark the vitriolic chemistry needed between her and Rose. Fiona Shaw is the best actress in this and does a grand job of sounding so overbearing and naggy that you can’t wait to get away from Rose too. The problem there is you run straight into the arms of Ingrid who is the worst character out of the trio. She comes across as often strange, sometimes creepy, and almost always frustrating with her dialogue and Krieps’ delivery. There’s a scene early on with Krieps saying ‘It’s shoes!’ with the cadence of someone in a mental asylum; not to mention the unbeatable compliment toward to Sofia the end of the film “Your face is like a blue planet, and your eyes are like little animals… and they’re sad”, I’m paraphrasing from memory but it’s burst out loud bad.

There’s no chemistry in the love story and as a result I just cannot believe that Sofia would act out this way for this woman, the spark between them is non-existent and without that the romance is always going to fall flat. I think the blame falls almost solely on writer/director Rebecca Lenkiewicz for this. A very solid screenwriter with such great scripts as Ida and She Said up her sleeve, this is her directorial debut and it shows. With more experience and time to work with the actors to get those performances guided to a better performance this could’ve been a much much better adaptation of what is a very successful novel by Deborah Levy.

Story structure is lacking, there’s a whole ten minutes in Greece visiting Sofia’s father that doesn’t justify taking the story out of the central location in my opinion. When a film is 92 minutes and you feel it’s length, then you know something has gone wrong. Visually it does look nice, Christopher Baluvelt is a very talented DP and that Spanish coast does look sweaty and dreamy. The soundscape in this is also quite effective, there’s a barking dog on a roof throughout a good section of the film which just adds more and more to the tension of some of the scenes. I just wish the writing held up to the standards that the visuals set.