We all begin from a place of idiocy when tackling family trauma.

This is largely because very few of us can hit the ‘pause’ button on life and explore our damage at our leisure, taking our time with our healing journey and tending to each scar with the requisite care and tenderness.

Like death, trauma is one of the few instances of the ungraspable numinous we still encounter at an alarmingly regular rate in our otherwise secularised existence; it’s slippery and hard to categorise, and you cannot pin it down and name it like Adam was instructed to do when first placed on earth.

And even though we’re popularly guided to apply a cause-and-effect template to trauma (‘I am like this because X happened to me when I was young’), the ghostly after-effects will still linger, and will not be sucked into ectoplasm boxes any time soon. So we can’t analyse. We can’t sit down to calmly pore over things. Still babes in the woods. Still dumb to what came before and what will come next.

Which is why I appreciated Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk: a wry, caustic treatment of trauma and how it seeps down into a mother-daughter relationship, zooming in particularly at a volatile time in both Rose (mother) and Sofia’s (daughter) lives, during which they arguably attempt to undertake what I’ve described above: hitting pause on life so that Rose – but only Rose – may finally heal her ailment (inability to walk) for good.

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The mixed reception to both the novel – I get a feeling that most people viewed its Booker Prize shortlisting as a perfunctory gesture, riding on Levy’s reputation – and now Rebecca Lenkienwicz’s film adaptation is likely down to a number of factors.

Characters rendered in oblique psychological brush strokes – at times incomplete at best, insufferable at worst. A loaded narrative proposition which never tips into melodrama but offers us little by way of conventional catharsis either. The dangling promise of a queer sub-plot which in the end makes no attempt to say anything politically significant about such an arrangement…

And so on.

I do agree that the novel is somewhat slight, and that other writers would have perhaps filled out the story with a more generous well-spring of empathy towards our characters, particularly the leading female triumvirate that leads the show: Sofia, Rose and Ingrid – the enigmatic, bandana-sporting seamstress who, in the film, appears to Sofia like valkyric vision: astride a horse on the hot Spanish beach: unlikely, unpredictable and ultimately, affected to a fault and hardly the safety raft Sofia needs. But we should all learn to take work on its own terms, and the gaps that both Levy and Lenkienwicz leave out are spaces where discomfort and tension is allowed to grow.

It’s the same tension that grows mushroom-like out of the idiocy of our own thwarted attempts at understanding just what’s wrong with us.

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Rose has been paraplegic for as long as her aspiring anthropologist daughter can remember, and when we meet them they have temporarily relocated to Almería from London to pursue a last-ditch attempt at treating this ailment for good: enlisting the costly and unconventional services of Dr Gomez, whose methods have more in common with a version of talk therapy than anything resembling a hard medical approach.

Sofia is her mother’s keeper, and has been for a long time. (Her Greek father Christos is out the picture – having flown the coop back to Athens years ago; he now has a baby daughter by his “child bride”). She is prematurely bitter as a result, and her training as an anthropologist only serves to widen the scope of her pain. Crucially, however, this default mode – the paralysing cycle of familial duty and a stalled approach to her academic development – leads to no breakthroughs.

It’s a recipe for an endlessly deferred existence; a purgatory made even more deeply manifest by their stay at the scorching Spanish seaside. Because Rose isn’t keen on solutions either – Lenkienwicz adds a ghost of trauma to keep the clock ticking there too – and finds comfort in endless deferral.

Which is where the matter of tackling trauma by employing agency gets particularly tricky.

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The most significant coup of the film adaptation is arguably its casting. For all that Emma Mackey supposedly came in late in the day – our screening in Malta was happily accompanied by a surprise Q&A from the film’s co-producer, Christine Langan, who revealed as much – there is something inevitable to the Sex Education star flexing her dramatic muscles here: effectively, she builds on the easy charm of that show by depicting another sensitive and intellectually curious young woman in, however, a far more sombre and mercurial key.

Fiona Shaw makes for an equally obvious fit for Rose: the veteran actress knows her way around that toxic mix of haughty entitlement and whiny dependence and understands that it’s part and parcel of how she wields her power over her daughter.

And I’d be hard-pressed to imagine anyone other than the prolific and dependably luminous Vicky Krieps in the role of Ingrid. Sofia is swept along, and so are we. At least we are at first, until her accumulated deceptions – and the underbelly which animates them – chip away at the implication that she is here to create a welcome oasis of bliss for Sofia.

On this subject, I also have a bone to pick with some of the ripples emerging from the critical consensus on the film, both in mainstream publications and online commentary, namely that Ingrid is yet another example of a ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope.

In many ways, she is. And that is precisely the point. Ingrid is clearly someone who has internalised, and weaponised, her status as something that could be construed as a real-life manic pixie. But as the story progresses, we see that crumble right before our eyes, and we follow Sofia closely on that journey of realisation.

Like Rose, Ingrid shapes her entire identity around her inability to cope with the defining traumatic incident of her life. She knows it happened and what it implies, but she’s either unable or unwilling to process it, so she gilds and embellishes a persona out of the elisions and deviations she takes to avoid confronting things head on (her being a seamstress feels apt, here).

In the middle of it all is Sofia – whose coping mechanism is neither aggressive self-pity (Rose) or promiscuous hedonism (Ingrid) but repression. In this way, she becomes the perfect bedrock on which both Rose and Ingrid can vent their fears, desires and complaints, assuming that Sofia will stick around to absorb it all.

In fact, Sofia’s troubled and troubling pursuit of agency is the true ticking clock of the narrative, and it’s a strand that resonates deeply, particularly with those among us who have been forced to become parents to their own from a young age.

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You could say that my parents were a mix of both Rose and Ingrid. Charmingly bohemian and easy to love among the social circle they frequented, they were also inept at managing their own emotional landscapes and taking the temperature of their kids’ true needs. Ridiculously young immigrant parents going at it alone with only nominal support (and at a long distance) from the extended family, and relying on badly-managed improv and reheated cliches to ensure we somehow stayed alive.

It’s no wonder that they took any complaint as an affront. That keeping the peace was top priority. We all took pride in not shouting, even if a good row would’ve released energy that would remain suppressed, set to do poisonous damage many years down the line.

Following a stroke, my mother was left in a coma for ten years; the stroke occurred just a few months before my own father suffered his first, which he survived, only to suffer a fatal one a decade and a bit later… largely the result of unheeded medical advice and the same, Rose-adjacent refusal to comprehend that eternal passivity and dependence on others cannot be a permanent life goal.

As such, I very much identify with Sofia’s default setting: keeping the peace by keeping mum. I felt the ripples of damage her repression causes, and I sympathised with her falling for Ingrid: this is an image of who you want to be – a free spirit; ironically, in my case, the same projection of bohemian freedom modelled by my parents in life.

Watching Hot Milk in 2025, after the fallout of losing both my parents, I’m beginning to understand why I’ve always been drawn to coming-of-age stories, of which this is a finely wrought and arthouse ready reminder (none of the tropey, self-help-booky Hollywood takes on that sub-genre here). I found kindred spirits in these retreating protagonists, but also the hope of some kind of release when they finally gain the confidence to break out of the vicious cycle which defines them.

In a weird way, this is aspirational fiction for me. And Sofia’s small wins – working up the courage to steal a fish from the market; liberating a noisy neighbours’ dog from its cruel confinement atop a sun-baked rooftop – feel as they are presented: welcome irruptions of healthy transgression, the promise that you can change things around.

That agency is more than just a myth.