MUBI PROGRAM NOTES: Adapting Deborah Levy’s acclaimed novel about a mother and daughter’s codependence, director Rebecca Lenkiewicz contrives a sensuous visual language in which to wrap her characters. In this exclusive essay, Thirza Wakefield unpacks the patterns and symmetries that force a souring relationship to breaking point.   Read full essay here.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama". Strictly speaking, it's a psychoanalytic one – a clue-sprinkled case study, involving talk therapy, of a woman whose repressed trauma has confined her to a wheelchair for 20 years. She’s so querulous and demanding that whether she gets up and walks at [...]

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut Hot Milk opens with a quote from artist Louise Bourgeois that captures perfectly its disquieting and enigmatic tone: “I’ve been to hell and back. And let me tell you it was wonderful.” This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures. The film, adapted from [...]

Miss Austen BBC One/iPlayer Ah, the joy of a new Jane Austen drama – except this one is about the real author, whose 250th anniversary is this year, and the personal letters her sister Cassandra destroyed. Still, the adaptation of Gill Hornby’s novel is every bit as swoony and whip-smart as one of the literary legend’s stories. Keeley Hawes is [...]

... Ferran has spent the last few years playing ever more challenging characters on both stage and screen. One in particular is also a character-builder herself: Jane Austen. In the PBS series Miss Austen, based on Gill Hornby’s bestselling 2020 novel, Ferran plays the strong-willed and impishly observant author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, a wonder of charisma and comic timing. [...]