Babyteeth (2019): A Teenager's Relapsing Cancer

Milla, sixteen, is standing on a suburban Sydney platform when Moses, a scruffy 23-year-old drug user, crashes into her. Her nose bleeds, he panics, and she is transfixed. Milla is being treated for cancer.

Her parents watch with horror as their seriously ill daughter falls for exactly the wrong person. Henry is a psychiatrist who writes prescriptions for his own wife. Anna is a former concert pianist adrift on medication.

Moses steals drugs and prescription pads from the house. The family's boundaries then collapse in stages. They let him in, then let him move in, then Henry starts supplying him, because Milla is happy and nothing else seems to count.

The story runs in wry titled chapters. Milla shaves her head and wears a bright wig. She plays violin, goes to a party, and insists on being treated as a person rather than a patient. After her seventeenth birthday she tells Moses she is in constant pain and that it is nearly over. She dies at home soon afterwards with her family around her.

The ending is discussed below.

The film is excellent on being looked at. Milla is watched constantly: for symptoms, for mood, for signs that she is about to break. The watching is loving and it is also a job she has to manage.

She wants a life rather than more time. That is the sentence teenage cancer services hear more than any other, and it is the source of most of the arguments between young patients and the adults around them.

The physical detail is plausible without being clinical. Hair loss and the wig. The nosebleed. Energy that vanishes without notice between good days. Pain that only becomes constant near the end.

It is honest about the family, too. Parents self-medicate. A marriage runs on prescriptions. People facing a child's death start abandoning rules that no longer seem to matter, and the film shows that happening by increments rather than in one dramatic collapse. The home death, unhurried and attended, is realistic.

Milla's cancer is never named. Neither is her treatment. That is a deliberate choice by the director, and it works dramatically, but it means the film cannot be accurate about any particular disease because it is not describing one.

Her decline is also gentler and better lit than real advanced illness. She stays mobile, articulate and photogenic. Her pain arrives as a line of dialogue rather than as something that reorganises her days. Hospital staff and palliative care barely appear.

Two things in this household would set off alarms in real life, and the film lets both pass as romance.

A psychiatrist prescribing drugs for his daughter's boyfriend is not a lapse of taste. It is a serious professional and safeguarding problem, and it is the kind of thing that ends careers.

The second is medical. Cancer treatment weakens the immune system, sometimes severely. Recreational drug use in the house, shared equipment, and a partner cycling through infections are genuine risks to someone whose neutrophil count is low. The film treats Moses as chaotic and charming. A treating team would treat him as an infection risk and say so.

Because no diagnosis is given, the honest topic is cancer in adolescents.

The National Cancer Institute reports that in 15- to 19-year-olds the most common cancer types are thyroid cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma, brain and other central nervous system tumours, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Across the wider 15-to-39 group, the most common are breast cancer, thyroid cancer, testicular cancer and melanoma. Leukaemias, sarcomas including bone cancers, cervical and colorectal cancer also occur in this age band.

That list surprises people. The cancers most associated with childhood are not the ones that dominate the teenage years, and the ones that do dominate are mostly not the ones films choose.

There is no cancer screening for teenagers or young adults at average risk. No blood test or scan is recommended for healthy young people. Everything therefore depends on symptoms being reported and taken seriously.

The signs worth acting on are ordinary ones that persist:

• A lump or swelling that does not go away.
• Bone pain that wakes them at night, or that no injury explains.
• Unexplained bruising, nosebleeds or bleeding gums.
• Drenching night sweats.
• Fever with no clear cause.
• Unusual paleness or tiredness.
• Weight loss without trying.
• A mole that is changing.

Young adults are often diagnosed later than children or older adults, and the reasons are structural rather than medical. Symptoms get attributed to sport, exams, stress or a virus. Teenagers under-report. They also fall between paediatric and adult services, and may not have a regular doctor of their own.

The practical rule is a boring one. Anything unexplained that lasts beyond two or three weeks deserves a proper look, and it deserves it the second time it is mentioned, not the fifth.

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Babyteeth refuses to be a cancer film, and that refusal is its strength and its limit. You will learn nothing here about any disease.

What you may recognise is the negotiation at its centre. Milla wants her ordinary life back more than she wants safety, and the adults around her cannot give her both. Teenage cancer teams spend a great deal of time on exactly that trade, and it is a reasonable thing to raise with them directly: what can she still do, and what is genuinely off the table?

If you are the parent of a teenager with a symptom that has not shifted in a few weeks, the other half of this page is simpler. Ask for it to be examined. See possible warning signs and screening.

This page discusses Babyteeth for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email corrections@cancerexplained.org.