Hot Milk: a conversation with Deborah Levy

Reflections on the film and my conversation with author Deborah Levy

One of my favourite watches this summer was Hot Milk (2025), starring Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, and Vicky Krieps. Adapted from Deborah Levy’s brilliant novel and directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, it’s a simmering tale of love, control, and liberation, set in the stark landscape and scorching heat of the Spanish desert.

It follows Rose (Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Mackey) as they journey to Almería to consult an enigmatic healer. While there, Rose attempts to make ‘a break for self-realisation’, catalysed by her relationship with the alluring and mysterious Ingrid (Krieps).

I adored Deborah Levy’s book, and was so excited to see how Rebecca Lenkiewicz would transform it cinematically. And I wasn’t disappointed - from the opening quote by Louise Bourgeois (“I have been to Hell and back and let me tell you, it was wonderful”), to the film’s simmering, surreal atmosphere. As with Levy’s book, the film is a hypnotic portrait of female identity, rebellion, and desire.

Hot Milk is available to stream now on MUBI in the UK, Latin America, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Ireland, India, and more. I’ve discovered so many great female-led films from all over the world through MUBI - from Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, to Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. You can get 30 days free at mubi.com/katyhessel.

To celebrate the release of Hot Milk on MUBI, I thought I’d revisit some highlights from my 2021 interview with Deborah Levy for The Great Women Artists Podcast.

Levy is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, plays, and non-fiction works. She is one of the leading writers of our time, having been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Man Booker Prize.

I spoke to Levy about her writing process; creating complex female characters; feminism, freedom, desire; and much more.

Let’s take a look…

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Katy Hessel: I would love to start by asking you, what attracts you to writing about the lives of artists?

Deborah Levy: I don’t set about to, somehow they just kind of dance into my writing. I look at a lot of art and I've taught writing in art schools. I guess the image is everything for me, I can't start writing without some kind of image in my mind. This can be really very mundane. […] When I was writing my novel, Hot Milk, which is a kind of mother and daughter contemporary pilgrimage to the south of Spain to cure the mother's legs, I had to kind of design […] a clinic, and I wanted this clinic to be in the desert, in the shape of a breast. So there I am, with tea cups, turning them upside down in my writing shed, trying to figure out what it's made of: from milky, veined marble, all this kind of stuff. So literally, that is how I begin to write.

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KH: You discovered the Surrealists when you were a teenager - what was your immediate reaction to them? And how have the Surrealists carried you through your life?

DL: Well, I mean, that very first blast [was] Meret Oppenheim, her fur teacup. I just wanted it, I mean, I literally wanted it. And then I read up on her and discovered that when she arrived in Paris, she made a little copy of Giacometti's ear from marzipan and walked around the rooftops in Paris holding it. And I thought, well, why not?

And Leonora Carrington, the painting that I saw at 19 was Inn of the Dawn Horse, her self-portrait. This young woman with wild hair sitting on a chair with a white rocking horse behind her on the wall and out of the window is a real white horse running through this very landscaped garden, and she is in conversation with a many-uddered hyena! I guess what I got was that it was like a manifesto, a bid for freedom. I got that as a young woman from that Carrington painting. It spoke to me, and I wanted to know what kind of conversation she was having with that hyena.

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KH: I'm fascinated by Lee Miller, has she influenced you when building characters for your fiction as well?

DL: I'm thinking about the character of Ingrid in Hot Milk… Maybe I had Lee Miller in mind there. I don't really have very much to say about Lee Miller, except that she makes me want to know more, and to see more. There's so much left out somehow. […] It's a sort of longing and pain and mystery. I really like that, and those are qualities that I want in my work, too. I hate work that explains everything, that ties up every single meaning and every single plot line.

I'd like to write in a way that encourages the reader to kind of sit back, to make an imaginative space for the reader to step in. I want to work with the conscious and the unconscious…

But what does that actually mean? It means that I suppose we become boring when we become very certain and we can't access our doubts and our superstitions and our anxieties and our longings. So if you can't access those — and I believe that Miller could, because they are there somehow in those images — then the world becomes dull to me. And so in that sense yes, she was an influence.

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KH: Totally. I love the way the Surrealists especially, and other artists as well, they become characters, we imagine this life they had, their life is a sort of narrative, an unimaginable story that happened. You know, [Leonora Carrington] running away from debutante life, to Paris, to Mexico…

DL: You know, just how much it takes to become an artist — what happens if you stay at home and you do everything that you're supposed to if you are a female artist of that generation? Nothing much was really going to happen. We can see even someone like Vanessa Bell, she didn't run away, her parents died, but she had to make a completely different structure to paint every single day. Had she had a conventional marriage, I don't think she would have been able to do that.

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DL: It is so very hard, I believe, for women to make themselves present, because there's so much to absent ourselves from. Especially for Francesca Woodman’s generation. The societal gaze, or you could say, the patriarchal gaze, is so violent on you all the time. So why would you just be totally present to it - you want to sort of zone out of it. This is how I talk about absence and presence. It's not an easy thing. To make yourself present in art, for that generation, is a huge triumph, really.

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KH: Does Francesca Woodman ever inspire you when creating female characters? Or do you find that characters are carrying her soul? Or do you feel like, as a writer, you carry her soul?

DL: I don’t know if I carry her soul. I think we have the same problems. She's looking at representation. She's looking at, how do I represent the female body? I might say, well, how do you write a female character that interests me? It's not a general thing. She's got to have some sort of interior life - what is she there to do? I often ask myself this. In many films, I think, what are the women in this film here to do? Apart from service everyone else's desires, and be sexy, and be desired too. You know nothing about them. And apparently just being desired is to know a lot about them.

[…] Let her zone out, let her be powerful, let her be fragile. Let her be clever, let her be really stupid on Tuesday, let her be everything. These are very obvious things, but they often kind of are missed out. You either have to be incredibly powerful and empowering, or fragile and vulnerable — but none of us are really like that. We're all of those things, as we all know.

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DL: This feeling of experiment. Like when you're young, you begin to write, you begin to fill up a page and you're just going to see where it leads you. You don't necessarily understand it, thank God, what would be the point in continuing if you knew everything about it.

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Thank you for reading this Substack. Happy GWA’ing! You can listen to the full GWA podcast episode with Deborah Levy here. If you think someone else might enjoy this too, please spread the word and share this article. If you have any feedback, please comment below.