Cinema – Film “Baby Teeth”: A girl stands in the forest

If you want to illustrate the achievements of a civilization, the easiest way is to confront that same community with the foreign. It will become apparent pretty quickly that the new is always accompanied by the fear of change and loss of status, which is why societies are essentially conservative. The film “Milk Teeth” by the Swiss-Swedish-German director Sophia Bösch wants to show us something similar.

When a girl (Viola Hinz) shows up in front of the house of Skalde (Mathilde Bundschuh) and her mother Edith (Susanne Wolff) and they illegally take her into their home, the hermetic and rigid community of a settler movement is suddenly shaken. People have fallen for the superstition that there are so-called wolf children who spread mischief and whose baby teeth never fall out, which is why most residents carry chains with their fallen children’s teeth in front of them like a monstrance: Look, I’m good.

Because Skald and her mother are not particularly loyal to the line, they take the girl in because it reminds them of their own fate. At the beginning you feel at least a little solidarity among the women of this backwoods community, who constantly drink schnapps, but the solidarity becomes increasingly fragile the more Skalde resists sending the girl with the name Meisis away.

There are films that manage to make the unspoken comprehensible and tangible and that draw their fascination or evoke a feeling of emotion from this. A work of art like “The Quiet Girl” by the Irish director Colm Bairéad manages to translate traditional interpersonal codes into gestures, images, movements or looks, so that you can still understand how the characters in the action feel, even without it – for example common in German films – requires a comment on the plot just shown (wooden hammer cinema).

But “Milk Teeth” leaves you alone in an unpleasant way because it only partially manages to make this cryptic world in which Skald and Edith live understandable. Why is the relationship between mother and daughter so strained, why does this village community live together in such an archaic way, even though it quickly becomes clear that the film is not set in a distant past, but rather in the future? What happened to throw them back to such simple ways of life? What internal dynamics characterize this hillbilly movement (besides the extremely pronounced skepticism towards strangers)? All of these questions are thrown at your feet without any ideas, as one could at least hint at, and so we are left with a very distant relationship to the characters and their conflicts that are laid out before us.

Really good films, with their consciously placed blank spaces, give you time to think about what makes a life tick.

Really good films, with their deliberately placed blank spaces, give you time to think about what makes a life tick, but this film only manages to do that in very few places. For example, if it becomes clear that not everyone is ready to take their place in the community, then this diaspora’s authoritarian social plan will also be called into question. But we don’t really know what their rules for living together are. Are these hillbillies a Nazi dropout community in an Islamist European dystopia (stolen from Michel Houellebecq) or an isolated environmental movement on a planet ravaged by the climate crisis? It wouldn’t be too much of a guide to at least make that clear to you.

Ulrich Matthes plays the tribal chief of this redneck community with a woodcut-likeness that you wouldn’t expect from an actor of his stature and which seems strange because it reveals such blatant weaknesses in the script, which lets him say sentences like: “To be part of us again “He must receive his just punishment.”

Overall, the film is not at all suitable as an allegory for today’s world and its tendencies towards isolationism or fascism. All we learn is that rigid, oppressive social structures are bad because they are inhumane and negate the achievements of all liberal democracies. Folk horror films like “The Village” (2004) or the Prussian morality painting “The White Ribbon” (2009) have this fear of the authoritarianism of the masses in much greater detail and with enormous precision in the character drawings of the protagonists dissected.

“Baby Teeth,” which is based on the novel of the same name by the young Berlin author Helene Bukowski, is a difficult film to grasp because it actually blocks all access. Neither the characters nor the plot give you any idea of ​​what is supposed to be shown to us, because almost every aspect of the story is abstracted or not told to the end. So if inaccessibility is made into a pose, then it’s simply not a good film.

»Milk Teeth«, Germany/Switzerland 2024. Director and screenplay: Sophia Bösch. With: Mathilde Bundschuh, Susanne Wolff, Viola Hinz. 97 minutes, start: November 21st.