Milla is a teenager with a serious illness, and the person she falls for is the last one her parents would have chosen. Babyteeth, Shannon Murphy's 2020 Australian comedy-drama, takes that collision and turns it into something far stranger, funnier and more tender than the premise suggests.
What is Babyteeth about?
The meeting happens on a railway platform, almost by accident, and from there Milla's carefully managed life begins to tilt. Moses is older, scruffy, unreliable and involved in small-time drug dealing, and his arrival in the family home sets off alarms for her mother and father, a couple already stretched to breaking by their daughter's diagnosis and their own unspoken troubles. Instead of a straightforward illness drama, the film becomes a portrait of a household in freefall: parents who medicate themselves to cope, a boy who cannot decide whether he is a guest or a thief, and a girl who, knowing how little time she may have, decides to live at full volume. The tone swerves between the absurd and the heartbreaking, often inside a single scene, and chapter-style title cards break the story into small, oddly named episodes. What holds it together is Milla herself, whose appetite for music, colour and risk keeps the film from ever settling into pity.
About the cast
Eliza Scanlen leads the cast, with Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis, Toby Wallace, Andrea Demetriades, Emily Barclay, Charles Grounds and Priscilla Doueihy alongside her. Scanlen carries the film with a performance that refuses sentimentality, while Mendelsohn and Davis bring a raw, frayed energy to the adult roles and Wallace matches the unpredictability of the story around him.
Context & significance
Babyteeth marks the feature directing debut of Shannon Murphy, who came to film from a background in theatre and television, and the movie's confidence with tonal shifts shows that stage-trained eye for performance. Running just under two hours, it belongs to a strand of Australian cinema that treats suburban family life with a mix of dark humour and genuine feeling, and it was warmly received on release in 2020, particularly for its lead performance and its refusal to follow the usual rules of the terminal-illness genre. Rather than asking audiences to brace for grief, it asks them to notice how much life gets lived in the meantime.
Watching Babyteeth on Ktime
Babyteeth is available to stream on K-Time. Reading this page is free; to watch the film you will need to log in with a K-Time account. The service is built in Persian for Iranian viewers abroad, with a Farsi interface throughout.