Jake has recently become the man he always was. His family has not caught up. That is the whole engine of Sweet Milk Lake, and Harvey Zielinski, who wrote it and directed it and plays both of its leading roles, understands something about that situation that most movies get wrong. He knows it is not primarily sad. It is complicated, awkward, sometimes very funny and underneath all of that it is dangerous.
We meet Jake in a Melbourne nightclub. He is shy. The music is loud, a man is flirting with him in a way that is not quite about him, and his friends mean well in the manner of people who have decided to be supportive and would like some credit for it. The next day there is lunch with the family. His mother (Belinda McClory) uses the name he no longer answers to and does not apologise for it. She is also distracted, because her estranged husband keeps calling and she does not want to talk about that either. His twin brother Sam is doing well in property and his natural confidence makes Jake seem even smaller.
So Jake flees to Sweet Milk, the country town where he grew up, to see his father Lee (Kieran Darcy-Smith), who is dying and does not know his child has transitioned. Here the film arrives at the moment that could have ruined it. Lee looks at his visitor and sees Sam, and Jake does not correct him.
Historically, the premise of mistaken identity is a machine for generating easy laughs in comedies, and in dramas where it is a machine for generating punishment. Zielinski does something much more difficult – he lets well-drawn and appealing characters be themselves. From this comes unforced humour and an undercurrent of tension, both fuelled by acceptance. Jake gets taken fishing. He gets pulled into a fight outside a pub. He is absorbed into the rituals of small-town masculinity by men whose warmth toward him is completely genuine, and completely conditional on a fact they do not have.
That is the trap, and Zielinski springs it slowly. He wants us to enjoy the warmth first, and we do. There is real pleasure in watching a young man who has been braced against the world for years finally relax in a family home, or a pub. Then we start doing the arithmetic he is doing, and the pleasure gets complicated, and by the middle of Sweet Milk Lake, every friendly and funny scene feels like it is set over a trapdoor.
The joke, if we can call it that, is not that Jake is deceiving these men, it is that they are seeing him correctly for the first time in his life. They are also the men who would turn on him were Jake to tell them about his recent history.
That tension entwines with a burgeoning romance. Toby, played by Hunter Page-Lochard with an enormously appealing charm, is the visibly queer man in a town that does not have much room for one, and he is not hiding. That decision costs him something he has evidently already decided to pay. When he and Jake are together, we are watching a man being properly seen by someone he is lying to and they make for some of the films strongest scenes.
Zielinski is playing Jake, and Sam, and – this is the interesting one – Jake playing Sam, which is a third character with its own vocabulary. He does it with posture, a slight shift in his voice and with the length of the pause before he answers a question. What we watch is a man acquiring confidence in real time rather than a man who has it, and that is far more interesting to look at. It is also the movie's best joke about gender, which it makes without underlining – every man in Sweet Milk is performing masculinity, but Jake is the only one who had to learn the part.
Zielinski has been good on Australian television, in White Fever and Deadloch. I’m not sure anyone saw him on Catherine Hardwicke's short-lived Quibi series Don't Look Deeper opposite Don Cheadle and Emily Mortimer, but it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t good there too. Here, his work is far more complex and demanding and the result is an achievement that feels worthy of awards. Actors who direct themselves are usually too kind to their own faces. Zielinski is not.
Sweet Milk Lake runs 94 minutes and looks like a far more expensive one. What leaves an impression, even more than its richly lived-in locations and the beauty of Victoria’s Alpine region, is that Jake is doing something dishonest in order to be with his dying father. Is that grace, or is it a man erasing himself to be loved? Zielinski will not say. A lesser filmmaker would have told us, but instead he trusts us. That is a rare thing for a first-time director to do, and it is why I think we are going to be watching him for a long time.
Director: Harvey Zielinski
Cast: Harvey Zielinski, Hunter Page-Lochard, Mia Morrissey
Writer: Harvey Zielinski
Producers: Philippa Campey, Molly O'Connor, Harvey Zielinski
Composer: Chiara Costanza
Cinematographer: Michael Lincoln
Editor: Maria Papoutsis
Sweet Milk Lake screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on 8, 12, & 19 August 2026.
