WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Gunpowder Milkshake, now available on Netflix.
Gunpowder Milkshake, a highly stylized action film written and directed by Navot Papushado, focuses on a young woman, Sam (Karen Gillan), who was abandoned by her mother, Scarlet (Lena Headey). An accomplished executioner, Scarlet raised Sam alone after her husband was murdered. With some help from a group of weapons brokers known as the Librarians, Scarlet molds Sam into a next-gen killer, and then leaves her.
Early in Gunpowder Milkshake, a shaken Scarlet meets Sam at the Diner, a designated safe space for members of the outlaw class. Within moments of arriving, Sam can tell that something isn't quite right, that her mother isn't behaving like herself. Scarlet says that she has to go away for a while, but she doesn't usually go off the grid for indefinite chunks of time without taking Sam along. When Sam asks her why, her mother evades the question. It's only a few ticks of the clock later that men come looking for Scarlet, men she is forced to murder in violation of the peace offered by the Diner.
As Gunpowder Milkshake shows, Scarlet is devastated to leave her daughter in the care of a man named Nathan, a high ranking member of a criminal syndicate known as the Firm, but it's also clear that she feels she had no choice. When Sam asks to stay with the Librarians instead, a trio of deadly women in their own right who she refers to as "aunties," Scarlet tells her that it's too dangerous. The fact that the men chasing her were willing to break the Diner's code themselves seems to validate her belief that there is only one place that Sam could be safe, and that's under Nathan's wing.
What Scarlet didn't tell Sam was that in the hours before they met that night, she'd found and killed the man that murdered her husband, Sam's father. He's a powerful Russian crime lord who is so well connected that the moment Scarlet pulled the trigger, she knew that she had made a mistake. His son and his men came looking for her that night, and she knew they would never stop looking for her. And so, her choice was clear.
In the intervening decade and a half, Sam becomes an elite assassin who has earned the respect of her peers. She hasn't had any contact with the Librarians since the night her mother left and kills on behalf of the Firm. Unfortunately, in the service of her duties, she kills the son of a rival crime boss named McAlester, a man so revered in the criminal aristocracy that Nathan believes it's beyond his power to keep Sam safe. Hunted now by both the Firm and McAlester, Sam is running out of options when her mother returns.
The fact that Scarlet was at her side within hours of these inciting incidents drives home that while on the run, she was never very far away. In all of those lonely days and months and years, it turns out that neither of them was as alone as they thought.
Gunpowder Milkshake is currently available to stream on Netflix and will play in theaters internationally this summer. A sequel is in the works.