Lots of what the new Australian drama Babyteeth (available for digital rental on June 19) depicts—illness, risky first love, drug dependency—is stuff we’ve seen on film many times before. What makes this dreamy-sad film fresh and exciting is the perspective brought to familiar material by first-time feature director Shannon Murphy, making an auspicious big-screen debut after doing impressive work in television. (Most notably, to American audiences, on Killing Eve.) Murphy animates Rita Kalnejais’s script—itself an inventive reimagining of cliché—with insistent artistry, announcing her arrival as an ascendant talent.
Babyteeth, which won raves at last year’s Venice Film Festival, concerns an unhappy family. But their wealthy suburban Sydney malaise is not just the ennui of being stifled by comfort: teenage daughter Milla (Eliza Scanlen, herself a rising star) is ill, perhaps terminally so, with cancer, while her father, psychiatrist Henry (Ben Mendelsohn), and mother, Anna (Essie Davis), self-medicate in their attempts to stave off the tidal wave of grief looming over them. In some ways, a wave has already crashed—the worst is yet to come, but the family’s well-appointed home is already filled with the creak and groan of loss, maybe even the smell of it too. Murphy palpably conjures the sweaty, crushing feeling of a house filled with sickness, the way any small joy managed within it quickly evaporates in its stifling air.
Milla’s limited life is given new possibility—and her parents’ worry is briefly retrained to that of regular old protective parents—when she meets a wayward, also drug-addled young man named Moses (Toby Wallace), who’s been kicked out of his house and is in need of money, shelter, and care. The two kids—well, she’s 16 and he’s 23, a tricky dynamic that gets some exploration in the film before it’s somewhat credibly rationalized away—embark on a kind of courtship that’s both wary and hungry. At first, Moses may just be after Milla for what she offers: chiefly her medication, and the further supply perhaps promised by her father’s prescription pad. Milla, meanwhile, is looking for escape. The opening of the film sees her contemplating suicide—but Moses, with all his appealing disregard for rule and order, presents a more active freedom, one that requires participation rather than a ceding of it.
On paper, the loose premise of Babyteeth suggests a trite family drama aiming to subvert cozy liberal understandings. Who’s actually sick here, a lesser film might smugly ask. But in Murphy’s (and Kalnejais’s) hands, Babyteeth finds new angles of attack to approach all that hoary bourgeois tragedy and disruption.
Working with cinematographer Andrew Commis, Murphy creates a fluid visual language for the film. Some scenes come lilting by; others crash into each other. Time passes with the irregular rhythms of lucidity and memory. In the writing, Kalnejais is mostly careful to avoid clunky exposition—there are few dutiful explanations of what exactly is wrong with each character. Rather, we discover their pain as the film floats along. Some telltale omens can’t be avoided—the bald head, the vomiting, the loopy dinner embarrassment after too many pills—but the film mostly knows that Milla, her family, and Moses would all understand their circumstances without needing to plot them out for some unseen observer.
The cast rides the film’s gentle contours with agility. Mendelsohn and Davis are reliably excellent, each taking what could be boilerplate portraits of fraying parents and turning them into vividly individual people. Henry is wrong in his clinical distance and in his loving indulgences, a conflict that Mendelsohn handles without any prescriptive moralizing. Henry is neither a good father nor a bad one; he’s just one trying (and often failing) to find a pragmatic way through an impossible situation. As is Anna, who, in her pill haze, initially seems the more plainly broken of the two. Davis is able to locate Anna’s cogent side; she never goes for the obvious choice, instead treading the same liminal line as Mendelsohn.