Patience is not rewarded in Mihai Mincan's sophomore feature film, Milk Teeth. I was really rooting for this movie, as I had enjoyed his previous feature, To The North. Unfortunately, the only things that this movie made me feel were upset and dumbfounded, and completely emotionally disengaged from the story and the characters.Aesthetically, Milk Teeth is an infuriating disaster. I understand the choice of filming everything in close-ups as we're meant to experience the world from a child's perspective, but this trick or gimmick, or ARTISTIC INTENT™, is used even when it makes absolutely no sense to be used. That is, unless, we're at times in the POV of trees or air or whatever. The way this movie is shot made me really upset and bulldozed any hope and any good intention I had toward it. Would it have killed the DOP to just, I don't know, move the camera a few steps back? And to buy a fucking tripod? There is no way in hell someone actually thought that children's POVs are this wobbly and unsteady. Children are not bobble-heads, for crying out loud, nor do they all suffer from Parkinson's disease.Story-wise, it's also a big whatever. It has three big beats, and two of those miss the mark completely. The first big beat is the catalyst of the story: a young girl disappears while taking out the trash (we later find out that she was abducted by COMMUNISM™ - a joke, but not really) and her mother, father and main character sister start looking for her, while it's implied and also overtly stated that the police sit around and do nothing. The other two beats (or at least that's what I understood them to be, but maybe it's me that's off) verge more in the realm of child terrors, child fantasies - there's a Blair Witch moment that's almost ruined by amateurish spooky music (probably, actually, the only good moment in the movie), and another one towards the end that is just completely silly, even if, yes, I get it, this is supposed to be a child's imagination being besieged by loneliness and questions and fear (what I'm referencing plays out like this: the main character finds a dark room with photos of children - not those kinds of photos - and then runs around panting in the darkness).Initially I wanted to write some stupid joke review (about how the main character finds a...checks notes...illuminated walnut that looks like a light-up testicle - this is a thing that actually happens), but the more I thought about Milk Teeth, the more upset it made me, so there: a long rant. And I didn't even get into its other problems - pacing, acting, writing, and the rest of the music. As a few positives: there was a Pet Shop Boys song they used at the end (Suburbia), and the sound design was excellent and...I'm sure there were other things, damn it!2025 Ranked
