‘It’s About The Nature Of Being’

In Hot Milk, directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Fiona Shaw portrays Rose, a woman with a strange illness, who just moved to a seaside town in Spain with her daughter, Sofia, portrayed by Emma Mackey. Rose is in a wheelchair and suffers from chronic pain. During their stay in Spain, the two women meet with a new doctor to try and find the cause of Rose’s inability to walk.

This article contains important spoilers past this point

Rose needs Sofia’s help throughout the day, whether it is to bring her a glass of water or just to leave the house. When speaking with Shaw over Zoom, she told me that the physicality and Rose’s state of mind “were so profoundly connected to her syndrome.”

She added: “I took some classes with a choreographer and we spoke to a lot of people who suffered from this syndrome, not being able to move, you know, it’s logical rather than physiological. There was this tick that I had to perfect and it also comes with pain, which is actually much harder to act, because when you don’t feel pain, you don’t feel pain.”

She added: “You know, people who are in pain often look like they’re in pain, and I worked on that, because some of her irritability is connected to being in pain.”

Rose’s past is very mysterious and she hardly talks about it, even to her daughter. As Shaw explained, when her new doctor tries to find a link between her physical pain and her state of mind, Rose shuts him down immediately. At the end of the movie, we learn that Rose’s sister, Mary, who had supposedly died before Rose could even remember her, was actually Rose’s mother.

Seing that Rose is Irish, I asked the actress if she thought that Mary had been taken away to a Magdalene Laundry. The Magdalene Laundries were religious institutes open in Ireland from the 1920s to 1996. Held by the Catholic Church, these institutes were a place where young women who got pregnant outside of marriage, were sent to perform unpaid work in terrible conditions. Once they had given birth, most of the babies were taken away from their mothers, and the babies would either die of neglect, or be sold to foreign families.

Even if Hot Milk doesn’t explicitly mentions the institutes, we might think that this is what happened to Rose’s mother. Shaw said, “Rebecca was keen to keeping Rose Irish, and keep the past a classic Irish story of repressed abandonment.”

Shaw also declared that this is a “well-known story of that period.”

She added: “We bury things, you know they say that 96% or something of our brain is buried, and I sometimes think about that. We cannot access the subconscious except through tricks. I mean that’s what Jung says.”

Shaw also explained that what we do, even our gestures when we talk, might all come from our subconscious and that it is what is probably going on with Rose.

She said, “You really don’t know what’s pulling the strings way down deep in ourselves. But Rose doesn’t willfully hide it, it’s a shame.”

While the mother and daughter relationship is a major arc in the film, Hot Milk is also a story about self-discovery and breaking-free from our daily lives, obligations, past and even our mental load.

Shaw said, “I think like all good films, and I do think it’s a good film, it’s about something more, I mean of course the mother and daughter relationship is there, but it’s about the nature of being, and I’m really glad that you said that it stayed with you, because it stayed with me when I saw it. I think there’s a desolation in the middle of it and a bravery. I mean characters are characters, you’re a character, I’m a charater, but actually what it does is when you put characters together, the truth is being revealed or released.”

Sofia doesn’t really know her father, she saw him a couple of times in her life. One night, she has an argument with her mother and decides to go and visit her father, who lives with his new wife and child. While talking with her father, Sofia learns things about her parents that Rose had never shared with her. Is there an unreliable narrator in the film? Or is truth just a matter of perspective with these characters?

Shaw said, “You know when Sofia says ‘My father said you used to play chess’ and Rose says ‘We didn’t.’ Who is right? In a couple, one person says ‘We used to do that’ the other says, ‘No we didn’t!’ Which is true? We just don’t know, people remember things differently.”

Sofia took a break from her studies to take care of her mother. In the way Mackey portrays Sofia, we can see how tormented she feels. On the one hand, she wants to be with her mother and make sure she is okay, and on the other hand, the two women often argue and Sofia feels like she is suffocating. When the daughter tries to take some time for herself, the mother is constantly calling out for her, which is why Sofia is so conflicted about the idea of going back to school, knowing her mother needs help all the time.

“I just got that actually, but it’s very hard to concentrate for Sofia. My mother used to play the piano and it was very hard to study when my mother played the piano,” Shaw said.

She added: “We can say the mother is very selfish, but people in pain are selfish.”

At the end of the film, Sofia has a mental breakdown and is extremely worried for her mother. Indeed, Sofia saw her mother walking alone in the afternoon, which weirdly happens every now and then. When Sofia comes home and finds her mother in the wheelchair, Rose explains that it is because she doesn’t want to raise Sofia’s hopes up.

Sofia forces her mother to get in the car with her, and the two women have one of the most honest conversations they ever had. In a shocking final move, Sofia takes Rose out of the car, puts her on the wheelchair, and leaves her in the middle of the road, at night, as a truck is dangerously approaching. Sofia begs her mother to stand up, and fight for her life.

We don’t know if Rose ever finds the strength to stand up, as the movie cuts to credits with Sofia walking away from her mother.

Shaw said, “I saw the film twice and I thought the opposite on each occasion. It depends on the way you watch the film on a certain night. Once I thought ‘That’s it, she’s dead.’ The second time, I thought she got up. I don’t know. I think Rebecca likes it like that, I think she has done that really well because I literally had two different experiences.’’

Shaw’s impressive career in theatre, on television and on the big screen ranges from Harry Potter to Killing Eve, Fleabag and more recently Bad Sisters, Echo Valley and Andor.

She said, “I was very proud and pleased to play in Hot Milk, it’s very nice for me, in my age group, to be playing a leading part in a film. I really embraced it, I’m grateful to Rebecca for inviting me. I played so many leading parts in the theatre, that it’s fantastic when you’re asked again to carry the main bulk of the evening. So here’s to more of these big parts, even though I enjoy playing the visitors too.”