Shannon Murphy makes a moving, darkly funny drama from young love and serious illness, with Eliza Scanlen refusing every invitation to look saintly. The decorative flourishes sometimes get in her way; the performances are worth staying for.
Babyteeth has a difficult job: making a teenager’s hunger for experience matter when cancer threatens to dominate every conversation about her. Shannon Murphy gives Milla room to be impatient, attracted to trouble and difficult to protect. The film is funny enough to make its darker moments hurt, and we recommend it despite an occasional fondness for showing how unusual it can be. Moses is an older drug dealer, so the adults’ concerns are reasonable. That makes Milla’s attachment awkward in ways that a straightforward story of forbidden love would avoid.
Eliza Scanlen makes that attachment convincing without asking us to approve of every choice. Milla can be selfish, impatient and frightened, and the performance does not tidy those feelings into a sequence of lessons learned. Toby Wallace gives Moses enough tenderness to explain the attraction without making his presence feel safe. Their scenes have the uncertainty of two people working out what they want from each other, which makes the romance persuasive even when we worry about it.
The family scenes give Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn room to be frightened and ridiculous at once. We laughed at the dinner scene, then felt uncomfortable about laughing. Rita Kalnejais puts the characters’ awkward attempts to manage one another beside the fear nobody can quite manage, and the actors keep both visible. The meal works because their affection does not make them any less embarrassing, or much better at knowing what to say.
Andrew Commis moves between daylight, shadow and neon to keep the photography responsive to Milla’s experience. Brightness is allowed even when the subject is grim, which saves the film from looking as though everyone has agreed to be miserable in advance. Sherree Phillips’s production design helps sustain that bright palette, but the pastel prettiness sometimes feels too carefully arranged around the distress. We could do with less of that insistence on colour once the performances have made the household’s unease plain.
Amanda Brown’s music belongs to a soundtrack willing to change mood rather abruptly, and the children’s choir is an especially effective choice. It allows innocence into the film without making Milla behave innocently. The dancing is less consistently useful: repetition begins to turn her pleasure into something underlined for us. Stephen Evans’s editing leaves too many of these passages in place, when we already understand her determination to enjoy herself.
Teenage illness dramas can make the young person so admirable that there is little left for an actor to do. Babyteeth avoids that trap whenever it trusts Eliza Scanlen to be wilful, needy or simply interested in Moses. She makes the prospect of being protected from every mistake feel stifling, even when the protection comes from love. Watch it for her, with some patience for a director who occasionally decorates a scene that was already doing its job.
