Hot Milk

Sullenly charismatic with that pugnacious chin of hers, Mackey is too good an actress to be altogether at sea, but she’s been given segments of a person without enough glue in the script to help her out.

This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on -- but that is one of its main pleasures.

In principle, [Emma Mackey is] sufficiently enigmatic to carry a movie, and yet, the character herself is sketched a bit too thinly to sustain the short 93-minute running time, mostly because Lenkiewicz fails to establish what this character wants.

There’s a ‘60s arthouse movie in here somewhere, but “Hot Milk” instead relies on those films’ most tiresome and outmoded tendencies. Perhaps we, as audiences, have outgrown the stench of ennui, too.

I wish I could say I found Hot Milk affecting, but it’s continually dragged down by inertia, by a writer-director whose approach is too intellectual to give space to emotion.

Hot Milk is uneven, but it is rather more successful as an adaptation than Swimming Home, largely thanks to Mackey’s persuasive journey from pliant, broken-spirited wraith to raging harridan brandishing knives and fish guts at local men.

It has no certain tone, and it doesn’t seem to know what it’s about until the very final sequence, meaning the work of those excellent actresses builds to nothing.

As the intensity becomes claustrophobic, Hot Milk reaches its final crescendo and attempts to burst out of the liminal space it has occupied.

Despite a stellar cast and one of the most mind-blowingly abrupt, ruthless ends in recent memory, Hot Milk comes across as a missed opportunity.

Hot Milk ends up as a missed opportunity–one that fails to tap into the emotional depth or nuance of the source material, leaving a hollow, unfulfilled version of a complex story.