Babyteeth (2019): A Teenager's Relapsing Cancer

Milla, sixteen, is standing on a suburban Sydney station 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, and her parents — Henry, a psychiatrist who writes prescriptions for his own wife, and Anna, a former concert pianist adrift on medication — watch with horror as their seriously ill daughter falls for exactly the wrong person. Moses steals drugs and prescription pads from the house. The family's boundaries collapse by degrees: they let him in, then let him move in, then Henry supplies him, because Milla is happy. The story is told in wry titled chapters. Milla shaves her head, wears a bright wig, 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. They sleep together, and she dies at home soon afterwards, her family around her.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

The film is excellent on how a teenager with cancer is looked at — the surveillance, the pity, and the way everyone else's fear becomes her job to manage. Milla's insistence on wanting a life rather than simply more time is the thing adolescent oncology teams hear most often. The physical details are plausible: hair loss and the wig, the nosebleed, sudden crashes in energy between good days, and pain that only becomes constant near the end. It is also honest about the family around the patient — parental self-medication, a marriage held together by prescriptions, and the way parents facing a child's death start abandoning rules that no longer seem to matter. The home death, unhurried and attended, is realistic.

The diagnosis is never named and treatment is kept deliberately offscreen, so the film offers no accurate account of any particular cancer. Milla's decline is gentler and more cosmetic than real advanced disease: she stays mobile, articulate and photogenic, and her pain arrives mainly as a line of dialogue rather than as something reshaping her days. A father prescribing drugs for his daughter's boyfriend, and recreational drug use around a severely immunosuppressed patient, would in reality raise serious safeguarding and infection concerns. Palliative care and hospital staff barely appear at all.

Because the film names no diagnosis, the honest medical topic is cancer in adolescents and young adults. The commonest in this age group are leukaemias and lymphomas, brain and other central nervous system tumours, bone tumours such as osteosarcoma and Ewing sarcoma, germ cell tumours including testicular cancer, thyroid cancer and melanoma (NCI). Signs worth taking seriously in a teenager are ordinary ones that persist: a lump or swelling that does not go away, bone pain that wakes them at night or is not explained by injury, unexplained bruising, nosebleeds or bleeding gums, drenching night sweats, unexplained fever, unusual paleness or tiredness, weight loss without trying, or a mole that is changing. Crucially, there is no cancer screening for average-risk teenagers or young adults. No blood test or scan is recommended for healthy young people, so diagnosis depends entirely on symptoms being reported and not written off as growing pains, sports injuries, glandular fever or exam stress. Young people are often diagnosed later than children or older adults for exactly this reason. Anything unexplained that persists beyond two to three weeks deserves a doctor's review.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the one thing you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

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Babyteeth is worth watching as a film. It is not a guide to the disease it portrays. The gap between the two is what this page is for — and the thing worth carrying away is that a change which persists is worth a conversation, whatever a story led you to expect.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].