Night Milk
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Tiger Hornby
Genres: drama, experimental, LGBTQ+
Tones: melancholic, sensual, tense
An intimate evening between a queer woman and her girlfriend cracks open buried sexual trauma, and dissociation begins editing the room in real time. Reality and fantasy refuse to stay in their lanes.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most films treat trauma like a flashback puzzle to solve. Hornby treats it like weather moving through the room. That's the harder, truer choice.
Hornby refuses the trauma-flashback grammar, staging dissociation during sex as hallucinogenic rather than confessional. Carol-meets-Claire-Denis is a high bar but the formal commitment to mind-body split as editing principle is the right kind of ambitious.
Real interest in how Hornby stages the mind-body split during sex as something hallucinogenic — the pubic-hair-plucking and self-recording flickers cutting in like intrusive thoughts is a brave editing choice. Cricket and Betsey Brown as a pair is loaded casting, and the refusal of standard trauma-flashback grammar earns it.
Reviews
Realizing the hallucinogenic disassociation between mind and body during sex.