Fashion has cobalt blue. Beauty has jelly nails. And now, cinema has its own unlikely obsession – milk. We noticed it this time last year with Nicole Kidman’s infamous milk moment in Babygirl. Now, it’s back – this time in Frankenstein, with Oscar Isaac’s slightly unhinged recurring drink of choice: a glass of milk. But it was the reaction. Gasps and scrunched up faces to those scenes. Keep in mind this was a film that had flesh and human parts cut off in full display, yet the scene of someone simply drinking milk got almost a bigger reaction.
It was that sheer shock in the cinema that made me think. Milk – a formerly wholesome and nutritious elixir – has curdled its way into becoming Hollywood’s favourite prop. Once a symbol of childhood innocence, somewhere along the way, milk has become cinematic shorthand for discomfort – making audiences squirm at the contrast of wholesome dairy showing up in the hands of someone capable of doing wrong. It's cinematic irony in liquid form. As a 2017 analysis noted, everyone from Hannibal Lecter to the villains in Jordan Peele’s Get Out has used milk to twist purity into sinister – a glass of moral rot disguised as calcium.
Maybe that’s why watching Oscar Isaac sip continuously on a glass of full cream milk feels stranger, and more transgressive than any act of cinematic violence. If you're in need of a film that will quench the thirst for something creamy, you're in luck. Pour yourself a glass of full cream milk and peruse our 10 favourite films that will do just that. The best films to feature milk, below.
1. Frankenstein
2. Babygirl
3. Get Out
4. No Country for Old Men
5. Rebel without a cause
6. A Clock Work Orange
7. Inglorious Bastards
8. Pulp Fiction
9. Napoleon Dynamite
10. Barbie
