TIFF 2025: ‘Milk Teeth’ Review
With its lens firmly centred on a single personal tragedy, Mihai Mincan’s sophomore solo feature, Milk Teeth, carries with it a looming fear that revolution does not mean resolution. Set in the final year of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, Mincan’s screenplay allows a political revolution to unfold in the background of a terrifyingly common occurrence throughout the Socialist Republic of Romania. A coming-of-age film steeped in the darkness of a country on the verge of emerging from the shadows, Milk Teeth is an impressively constructed mystery that navigates an unknowable grief with unwavering patience.
There’s a haunting atmosphere that suffocates everyone in Milk Teeth. When Alina (Lara Comanescu) suddenly disappears right after Maria (Emma Ioana Mogoş) sees her sister head to the dumpsters, no one outside of Maria’s immediate family seems concerned. Life goes on, but the disappearance causes a fracture within Maria’s family that continues to splinter their bond. Maria’s mother, Cezaria (Marina Palii), becomes obsessed with finding someone that may never be found, while her father, Petre (Igor Babiac), becomes despondent. Meanwhile, the police offer little hope of their own as Alina’s disappearance is one of many cases of children disappearing without a trace. At such a delicate time in her life, Maria reckons with the trauma of losing a sister while watching her family suffer in their respective ways. Compelled to investigate Alina’s disappearance on her own, Maria slowly uncovers a world of broken systems and untrustworthy people.
There’s a reason it always seems like Alina’s disappearance is not being treated with the severity that Maria and her mother demand. Petre’s hopeless demeanour hints at a general acceptance that nothing good can come out of digging into her disappearance. The answers are likely grim, but further prodding is also likely to incite scrutiny from powers above and make Petre’s family suffer further than they already are. However, this is all background noise to Maria, whose perspective is the film's focal point. George Chiper Lillemark’s cinematography switches between first-person point-of-view shots of Maria and close-ups that often keep adults just in frame enough to understand the emotions of the moment. It effortlessly places the audience in Maria’s shoes, while also continuing to filter her innocence through a lens of despair.
Mincan’s previous film, To The North, was an oppressive thriller that mirrored its claustrophobic atmosphere with a confined setting. Milk Teeth is far more of a slow burn. It doesn’t tighten its grip but instead slowly envelops its characters in a painful reality. The haunting atmosphere that its political backdrop provides is exacerbated by the notion that Alina’s disappearance is just a drop in the bucket. The film personalizes a statistic and provides an intimate gateway into a country’s horrific past. Shadows play a significant role in imbuing Mincan’s film with imagery more typical of a horror film, but work effectively here in emphasizing the unknowable pain lurking in the darkness. A recurring image of a man in black becomes a cornerstone of Maria’s understanding of the world. As she interrogates her sister’s absence, it forms a clearer picture in her head of what the world really looks like.
Of course, the Romanian revolution of 1989 is unmistakably present in the background of Milk Teeth’s events. Inspired by a real-life story Mincan discovered while reading a Romanian Communist Militia Police file, the screenplay for Milk Teeth concerns itself with a single family. Still, it always feels more commonplace thanks to the way characters embody their political reality. This is not just one family’s struggle, but many. The tragedy that befalls Maria and her family is a symptom of a larger problem, and the way it takes hold of their lives makes the acknowledgement of its pervasiveness all the more chilling. At the heart of it all is a sturdy central performance from Mogoş that depicts a fragile time of life where pain can take hold and shape an individual’s entire worldview at the drop of a hat. Milk Teeth may remain intimate in its plotting, but Romania’s past becomes integral to fully grasping the suffering of its characters.
The 50th Toronto International Film Festival takes place between September 4th and 14th. Milk Teeth celebrates its North American premiere on September 10th, as part of TIFF’s Centrepiece program. The full list of films selected for the festival can be found here.
