‘Milk Teeth’ Venice Review: A Childhood Shattered Amid the Fall of a Dictatorship

What already feels like a recurring thread at this year’s festival — the Saudi drama Hijra starts from a similar premise, while the Russian Short Summer isn’t far off in tone — also runs through the Romanian film Milk Teeth. At its center is the story of a young girl whose life is upended when her older sister suddenly disappears. This time, the narrative unfolds in Romania in 1989, against the backdrop of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s crumbling dictatorship.

The protagonist is Maria (Emma Ioana Mogos), a ten-year-old who spends a seemingly ordinary afternoon playing in the street with her sister Alina (Lara Maria Alexandra Comanescu) and other neighborhood kids. Then, in a moment that feels almost casual, Alina goes to take out the trash and never comes back. When Maria and her friends search for her, she is nowhere to be found. Soon the parents arrive, frantic, and the horror sets in: their daughter has vanished without a trace. No one can explain what happened.

From there, the story branches in two directions. On one side, the parents desperately try to understand what occurred, colliding with the harsh political and social realities of the era — a time when disappearances like this were not uncommon. On the other, and more centrally, the film follows Maria, who must navigate the emotional shock of losing her sister while trying to reshape her world and adjust to the fragile new reality that her family faces.

Milk Teeth interweaves these two strands. It acknowledges the political dimension of the time — most strikingly in the figure of the resilient mother, whose efforts to get answers from an indifferent bureaucrat lead only to frustration — while keeping its focus on Maria’s day-to-day life in a small Romanian town increasingly shadowed by violence and uncertainty.

But the film is not merely a narrative of loss. It is also sensory, almost impressionistic, concerned less with constructing a traditional dramatic arc than with evoking feelings and textures. While the early sections build suspense around the missing girl, the film rarely strays from Maria’s perspective. We see, as she does, her family life unravel and a new, enigmatic, and frightening world begin to take shape before her eyes — one she cannot yet fully grasp.

A painful coming-of-age story, Milk Teeth portrays childhood innocence colliding with both personal tragedy and national upheaval. It frames the experience through a poetic lens, suggesting that in 1989 it wasn’t only Maria who had to grow up overnight, but Romania itself.