Every time I try to pin it down, it slips away. Even what its effect is is slippery, never mind how it achieves it - or, for that matter, why, or what the broader picture is that it's painting. But Hot Milk is powerful - sinuous, sulky, skating along on the surface, riven by subterranean forces. Cerebral and sensual. Slipping subtly unstuck through time, infused with the places it traverses, all significant - beachside southern Spain where medusa jellyfish sting mercilessly, a return to the father in Athens, Greece. Disquieting, at times menacing, at other times ecstatic, and bearing a wavering but sharp relation to the quotidian. Encounters, repetitions. Sofia and Rose, Dr Gomez and Nurse Sunshine (that would be Julieta Gomez), Ingrid, Juan and Matthew, Christos and Alexandra. Maybe its most signal achievement is how strongly it works on the level of representation and figuration while steeping itself in layer upon layer of symbolism, especially associated with the feminine (medusas, snakes, the breast-like formation of Dr Gomez's clinic, and many more). Any which way, it's quite something.
