Babyteeth (2020)
Director: Shannon Murphy
Screenwriter: Rita Kalnejais
Starring: Eliza Scanlen, Toby Wallace, Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis, Eugene Gilfedder, Emily Barclay
Bathed in the warm glow of Sydney sunlight, Shannon Murphy’s debut feature Babyteeth captures the dizzying rush of first love with a tender, uncompromising voice. The film opens with an image that quietly sets its tone: a baby tooth slowly sinking into a glass of sweating water — a small object that stands for growing up, sharp adolescent pains and the inescapable presence of loss.
Adapted from Rita Kalnejais’s play, the story centers on sixteen-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen) and the impulsive relationship that changes the rhythm of her life. Milla meets Moses (Toby Wallace) in a startling, slightly absurd encounter at a train platform: a near-accident that immediately tips into intimacy. Moses’s grin, irreverent energy and risky choices sweep Milla out of her cautious world. In one impulsive moment he even shaves her hair with clippers, a gesture that unnerves her parents but seems to Milla like an emblem of rebellion and freedom.
Milla’s parents, Henry and Anna — played with raw honesty by Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis — are thrust into a difficult balancing act. They prepare for the worst when it comes to their daughter’s terminal illness, yet they struggle to forbid the one thing Milla most desperately needs: the chance to feel alive. Against their instincts, they reluctantly allow her to pursue this dangerous but intoxicating connection. Rather than reduce their characters to mere grieving parents, Murphy gives them fully drawn interior lives, letting scenes breathe as they argue, reminisce and find ways to love despite the impossible circumstances.
The romance itself refuses easy categorization. Moses is messy: older, rough around the edges, and entangled in addiction and homelessness. Yet Wallace supplies a boyish charm and comic timing that turn him into a complicated presence rather than a villain. Scanlen’s performance as Milla is the film’s emotional core — she moves from buoyant, childlike curiosity to fragile maturity with a naturalistic fluidity. Moments of giddy flirtation — “But do you like like me?” — sit beside wrenching confrontations such as, “Stop wasting my time,” lines that reveal both adolescent urgency and the heightened stakes of Milla’s illness.
Cinematographer Andrew Commin’s handheld approach keeps the camera intimately close, registering the small physical gestures that make relationships feel alive: touches, embraces, tickles and awkward pauses. Murphy sequences the film in chapter-like beats, which allows each character’s perspective to emerge vividly and avoids flattening the narrative into a single melodramatic arc. The result is a film that is often funny, frequently tender and sometimes unbearably sad, but never manipulative.
Drug use runs as a recurring motif, depicted not as a sensational plot device but as a private strategy characters use to numb pain. For Moses, it signals dislocation from family and stability; for Milla, it sometimes functions as relief from physical suffering; for her parents, it becomes an anguished refuge in the face of impending loss. These parallel struggles underscore the film’s honest depiction of how flawed people cope with unbearable situations.
Music and movement are crucial to Milla’s sense of self. She dances in bars, sings with abandon and plays the violin in moments of quiet grace. Those scenes underscore the film’s central argument: the magic of life often appears in its simplest moments — a karaoke duet, a spontaneous dance on a dingy night out or a family gathered around a piano. Murphy resists reducing Milla to a “dying girl” trope; instead, she insists on the vividness of her joy and the integrity of her choices.
On paper, the premise might sound like familiar territory, but Murphy’s film sidesteps cliché through exact performances, textured visuals and tonal balance. The parents’ relationship, with its patient respect for Milla’s autonomy, at times evokes the gentle, permissive tenderness of families in other coming-of-age dramas — a comparison that helps place Babyteeth within a broader cinematic conversation without diminishing its originality.
Moses is hardly an ideal partner by conventional standards — his appearance and occasional recklessness make him a risky companion — yet he provides something Milla desperately wants: a sense of being seen, and a fearless invitation to live fully. This unlikely pairing, handled with humor and heartbreak, forms the emotional center of a film that celebrates life’s small sparks even while acknowledging its fragility.
24/24