Heartbreaking teen drama set to make stars of its two young leads
Babyteeth
Dir Shannon Murphy Starring Eliza Scanlen, Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis, Toby Wallace, Emily Barclay, Andrea Demetriades
Tim Robey
The Australian drama Babyteeth has four great characterisations waiting for us, but it’s vital to begin with Milla Finlay (Little Women’s Eliza Scanlen), the gravely ill 15-yearold schoolgirl around whom it all revolves. In the first scene, she’s on a suburban train platform in Sydney, staring down at the tracks. Caught in intimate close-up, it’s a moment of heavy-breathing panic that’s somewhere in the vicinity of suicidal – how close, we don’t yet know. Before she can show us, a rattailed, heavily tattooed young stranger called Moses (Toby Wallace) flings himself raffishly in her path.
Milla has some rare form of cancer that could be terminal, but which Shannon Murphy’s film doesn’t waste time diagnosing. It gives us no hospital scenes or kindly doctors doing their best; it just keeps its focus on a doomed teenager, and two haute bourgeois parents (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis) entwined in a shaky alliance to protect her from pain, while self-medicating to assuage theirs.
Moses turns out to be a small-time drug dealer in his early 20s, whose own mother, alienated by his live-wire antics, wants nothing more to do with him. His credentials may be dubious, not least to Milla’s parents, but Milla starts clinging to him as a kind of guardian Hell’s Angel for whatever time she has left. He’s a sneaky opportunist, too, who keeps breaking into the Finlays’ chic glass mansion to forage for prescription pills – drugs which the floundering Henry (Mendelsohn) comes by as a psychiatrist, and Anna (a brilliant Davis) devours in a daze.
Babyteeth started life as a play, which Rita Kalnejais has adapted herself here. It’s a testament to the verve of Murphy, making her directorial debut, that the film is spiky and impressionistic. Watching the four actors play off each other, which they all do with precision, carries an edge-of-the-seat exhilaration.
Milla has been so bottled up in this designer doll’s house, with her despairing, strung-out elders, that the chance to kick out and live a little feels like a drug that Moses sells her almost obliviously. A night out at a downtown rave is a fittingly trippy escape, a kind of Cinderella’s ball with ecstasy and lasers, till dawn breaks. She realises – because of Moses being utterly unreliable but also wary of her feelings – that she’s just woken up cold and alone, and still dying of cancer, on an empty rooftop.
Scanlen, superb, conveys a hunger for new experience just as touchingly as a fear of what happens when it all runs out. It’s a star-making performance, but the same ought to be true of Wallace, who has all manner of vocal and physical tricks. And while Mendelsohn and Davis are old pros, the former hasn’t been this good since Mississippi Grind five years ago, and it’s hard not to credit his revivification partly to the latter, a scene partner who’s one of the best in the business. That’s Babyteeth’s power, for the actors, and for us: everyone gets keen flashes of remembering they’re alive.