eileen (now streaming on Hulu) is a juicy, occasionally winking thriller starring Thomasin McKenzie as a shy young woman and Anne Hathaway as the femme fatale who makes everyone’s hearts beat and cockles alight. Director William Oldroyd adapts Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel of the same name and produces a succulent psychosexual film noir set during a mid-century Massachusetts winter, where the lighting is grim, the comedy is bleak, and hope is something that happens somewhere else. . . Have you sold this yet? No? Well, read on. I think it improves.
EILEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Hitchcock. No, he’s not here, but his spirit is in the foreground, staring out the windshield of a car as the interior fills with exhaust fumes and the score fills with Herrmannish. Inside is Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), who is HOT. Not just lowercase. She watches a couple kiss passionately in another car, then reaches out the door, grabs a handful of snow, and shoves it between her legs. This could be a fantasy sequence, but it’s hard to tell; I think it is, because usually with Eileen, her waking existence is so sad and depressing that the only way forward is inward. Her car is so totaled that it fills with smoke and will kill you if you don’t drive with the windows down. She lives with her father, Jim (Shea Whigham), who is a delight, if you delight in downtrodden widowers who are ex-cops forced into retirement because they drink too much and now have nothing better to do than stumble. down the street pointing guns at neighbors. The job isn’t much better for Eileen either. She works hard every day at a juvenile prison where all the other employees are Massachusetts residents with PO, and she imagines the handsome young security guard pressing her face against the glass and giving her the ok. As I said. All in capital letters.
One day in prison, Eileen takes out the trash and the bag tears and a disgusting stain comes out. She walks in and it’s the first day for the new prison psychiatrist, and if you’re questioning the Hitchcock thing, well, ask no more, because her name is Rebecca (Hathaway), for God’s sake. She’s from out of town and has Marilyn hair and EYES and so much confidence that no one around here knows where to put it all. Eileen takes Rebecca’s coat and waits until she’s not looking, buries her face in it and breathes deeply. The brutal tomahawk who runs things around here, Mrs. Murray (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), has put on the annual Christmas play, Christmas in prison, and warns everyone to behave because they never do during the show, and sure enough, about 90 seconds later, a fight breaks out. From her position manning the spotlight, Eileen looks over the melee and catches Rebecca’s amused look. One small glance from this woman leaves Eileen elated. You’d think someone gave her a million dollars and pushed her abusive father into the shit.
The next day at work, Eileen visits the mothers and searches them for, I don’t know, files or razor blades. One is Mrs. Polk (Marin Ireland), whose son killed a police officer. A police officer who was her father, yes. Mrs. Polk and her son have a tough meeting with Rebecca, who could use a drink after that, so she asks Eileen to join her later at the only bar in this dreary town. During the moooooooon, Eileen returns home to run the night challenge with her father, shave her legs, put on her late mother’s best dress, and apply some lipstick. Rebecca is already sipping a late-night martini when Eileen arrives at the bar. “You must have bright dreams,” Rebecca tells her, because Rebecca is absolutely the kind of human being who is a psychiatrist and she says things like “You must have bright dreams” while she looks good. IN. You. Rebecca doesn’t know the half of it, because I bet Eileen dreams about the two of them doing soft, messy things to each other’s genitals. Rebecca and Eileen turn heads when they dance together, and when an aggressive man tries to intervene and gets groped, Rebecca SCORES him one and then continues dancing. They end the night quite drunk and Rebecca leans over and kisses Eileen on her lips and Eileen drives home and wakes up in her own vomit in the car that she almost crashes into the house. She then enters and fantasizes about blowing her head off with her father’s gun. Dreams so bright.
What movies will it remind you of?: eileen it is like Carol if only it were a little more elusive and twisted. Tonally, it also recalls another excellent Cate Blanchett effort, the equally arty and almost creepy trash of Notes on a scandal.TO
Performance worth seeing: McKenzie and Hathaway are as captivating as we expect. But Ireland’s work is truly astonishing, as she delivers a deep and heartbreaking scene in the third act that you won’t get away from easily.
Memorable dialogue: Rebecca on smoking: “It’s a nasty habit. That’s why I like it.”
Sex and skin: Some incredibly horny moments that aren’t necessarily graphic, if that makes sense. Read: It’s a little hot and a little creepy, but there’s no real nudity to speak of.
Our opinion: Eileen’s father dresses her while Rebecca pumps her up, and inside her is a sludgy cocktail of self-loathing and longing for human contact that manifests as repressed lust. A little positive attention leaves Eileen giddy with the possibilities and, more specifically, the possibility of straddling someone, anyone, until she reaches her last moan. Otherwise, her existence seems terrible and hopeless, mired in the pain of losing her mother and the incurable despair of her father. She is wrong in ways that remain tantalizingly vague for most of the film; We reach the halfway point and we’re not entirely sure where this is all going, intrigued by the extremes this character can go to.
Said that, eileen he has opportunities to go crazy and really try, but he opts for restraint, sticking to the realm of pragmatic realism rather than indulgence. Stylistically, Oldroyd enjoys period details, shooting on film, and animating scenes with excellent retro jazz music. This is more classicism than neo-noir, maintaining the principle that you don’t introduce a gun in the first act without enthusiastically bringing it back in the third.
Once again, it is not the situations that fuel our intrigue, but the characters. We can recoil from Eileen’s disgusting little fetishes while feeling heartbroken from her emotional isolation. Whigham is horribly repugnant as her father, deeply broken by grief and, most likely, a war veteran’s PTSD; Jim is so pathetic that you can’t help but feel a tinge of sympathy for him even though he says terribly cruel things to him like “You’re different these days.” You’re almost interesting. Meanwhile, Rebecca is all Rorschach tests and lipstick-stained cigarette butts, a woman who perhaps tries too hard to hide her East Coast accent and be erudite, independent and mysterious, and just a little bit dangerous, totally. by design. Blended together, these characters feel like gunpowder and a spark. Whether they explode or just sit in their respective corners and threaten to explode is beside the point.
Our call: eileen is an unexpectedly captivating film noir. The performances are rich, the intrigue palpable, and the laughs very, very dark. TRANSMIT IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
