118 min | NR | June 19, 2020 | IFC Films
A terminally ill teenager falls hard for a twitchy small-time drug dealer her parents would never let through the door. Her mother medicates, her father prescribes, and the whole family pretends control is still on the table. Shannon Murphy takes the dying-girl movie and refuses to let it behave.
Milla Finlay is a seriously ill teenager. She meets Moses on a train platform while he shakes from withdrawal and bleeds from his nose. He is a 23-year-old drug dealer with no plan and no shame. Milla falls for him at once, and her parents must decide whether to forbid the relationship or hand their dying daughter what she wants. Babyteeth uses the terminal-illness premise as a frame for a harder question. The film is about a family that has run out of ways to protect anyone.
Eliza Scanlen plays Milla with a directness that refuses pity. She wants Moses and she says so. Scanlen treats the illness as a fact rather than a performance of suffering. Toby Wallace plays Moses as a charming parasite who keeps surprising himself with moments of tenderness. Essie Davis plays Anna, the mother, as a former pianist sedated into numbness by her own husband. Ben Mendelsohn plays Henry as a psychiatrist who writes prescriptions for everyone around him because he cannot fix the one thing that matters.
Shannon Murphy directs her first feature with a control that the chaos on screen disguises. Rita Kalnejais adapts her own stage play and keeps its theatrical spine intact. The film breaks itself into chapters with blunt on-screen title cards that name what is about to happen. The cards announce events before they arrive and turn each scene into a countdown. The device converts suspense into dread the audience carries the whole way through. Murphy lets comedy and grief share the same frame and never signals which one will win.
This is a film about parents learning that protection and permission have become the same act. Henry and Anna spend the story deciding what rules still apply to a child who is running out of time. The answer they reach is messy and human and never tidy. Murphy refuses the clean catharsis the genre usually delivers. The result is a debut that handles worn-out material with real nerve. It earns its emotion without begging for it.