A psychopath watching William Oldroyd’s deliciously confused Eileen, based on the book by Ottessa Moshfegh, might simply see it as an uplifting tale of personal liberation. After all, Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) transforms from a dowdy, repressed, compulsive masturbator – we watch her secretly rubbing herself under her tweed skirt on two separate occasions for the first few minutes – to an independent young woman with decisive action and agency in her own right Future in a fur coat topped with a lipstick smile. However, non-psychos are destined to have a more complex array of reactions to Oldroyd’s brazen genre-bender: a combination of alarm, amusement, disgust, surprise, and horrified, possibly inappropriate, laughter. It might prove an off-putting cocktail in some circles, but the crazies among us will find “Eileen’s” sheer chutzpah embedded in stylish, clever filmmaking oddly intoxicating and addictive.
Speaking of addicts, Eileen’s father (typically excellent Shea Whigham) may be an unrepentant alcoholic ex-cop who has a tendency to sit drunk by an upstairs window and point his gun at neighborhood kids on his way home from school, but he has his moments. During one such, with the career drinker’s relative clarity only on his first whiskey of the day, he provides a possible key to navigating the film’s narrative chicanery. Just like in the movies, he says, there are two kinds of people in the world: “those who move, those who are watched” and “those who just fill the space.”
His daughter, he claims with a casual cruelty typical of even their tenderest encounters, is one of the latter. But what if a lifelong space-filler who has never been paid much attention by anyone and whose eccentricities have so unnoticed nurtured into full-blown perversions suddenly decides to become a move-maker? Maybe “Eileen” is what happens when an unappreciated extra forces herself into the spotlight of her own life.
Such a dramatic transformation needs a catalyst. For Eileen, the wily, socially reclusive, rather unsanitary secretary in a 1960’s Massachusetts boys’ prison, it comes in the Marilyn-esque form of “Dr. Miss Rebecca St. John” (Anne Hathaway), the facility’s impossibly glamorous new prison psychologist. With her clicking heels, slim cigarettes and hair that’s perfectly blonde, Rebecca is as exotic as a bird of paradise in Eileen’s drab surroundings. And when she deigns to befriend Eileen, the effect is immediate: Eileen starts washing and wearing makeup more regularly, and tossing her shapeless beige outfits against pretty dresses and powder pink outerwear from her dead’s closet Mother. “You’re different these days,” her father remarks in her head. “Almost interesting.”
The parallels to Todd Haynes’ “Carol” are so obvious they almost seem self-conscious — but if the films have their similarities to December-centric stories of lesbian attraction that emerge between a reclusive younger brunette and a sophisticated older blonde, Oldroyd substitutes the velvety warmth of Haynes’ film with a seedy, cheesy, chilled edge that runs through everything from production design to Ari Wegner’s superbly vigilant cinematography. Here, New England winter isn’t something to watch through a picture window from a cozy fireplace sipping cocoa, but a frigid, treacherous thing — especially when you have to drive through with the windows down because your old rattling car is filling up with smoke , unless. Right from the start, well before the relationship first falls into psychological and ethical tribulations, if that’s “Carol,” it’s a cursed, clotted version of it.
Beneath the shy brushed cymbals of Richard Reed Parry’s superb jazz score, which manages to be both sultry and impatient as it moves from discordant passages to sweet, melodic resolutions, Rebecca begins to feel particularly for one of the prison’s inmates to interest. Leo Polk (Sam Nivola) takes his time after stabbing his father one night as he sits next to his mother (Marin Ireland, whose harrowing monologue earns her second standout Sundance moment this year after Birth/Rebirth). lay. . Eileen is also fascinated by the boy, because his crime seems to fuel her own fatherly murderous fantasies. In direct contradiction to Rebecca’s lofty claim that Massachusetts is a place “without fantasy, without imagination,” Eileen dreams violently in shocking sequences that Oldroyd intentionally shoots and edits as if they were actually happening.
Rebecca’s investigation into Polk’s case takes a sinister and frankly unprofessional turn, and she asks Eileen to help her, unaware that the mousy little thing she’s befriended is hardly the innocent, pliable tool to do so she held them. Part of the thrill of “Eileen” is the black comedic shift in the balance of power between the two women, exceptionally played by Hathaway and McKenzie, both of whom are career high performers.
Eileen, initially thrust into the limelight by Rebecca’s flattering attention, comes to herself and will soon begin replacing even the dazzling object of her fixation – love isn’t quite the right word – as the center of the film’s gravity. Sure, she can outperform Rebecca when it comes to twisted psychology, and perhaps it’s Rebecca’s compensation for all the little patronizing comments and her unconditional belief in her own attraction that she shrinks as Eileen expands. In the end, it’s almost as if Rebecca knows that for the first time she’s the stopgap in a film that bears someone else’s name.
Filmmaking terminology is apt, as this is a film practically drunk on the possibilities of cinema, pumping a ruthless modern energy through a wealth of classic Hollywood genres. Though adapted from the novel by the author herself, along with co-writer Luke Goebel (they previously worked on the far more straightforward Jennifer Lawrence drama Causeway), Eileen is far from faithful to its literary roots “Eileen” insanely film savvy. It moves, sometimes tortuously, sometimes with faltering abruptness, from a Sirkish-esque romantic melodrama to film noir to a black horror comedy that settles somewhere in the realms of one of the more outlandish Hitchcock thrillers. (It’s no coincidence that the gloriously somber opening credits are a direct mimic of “Rear Window’s,” or that Rebecca’s name and aloof blonde persona also reference the master of suspense.)
The formal rigor that made Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth such an impressive debut is felt throughout, but this time that directorial precision is applied to a tale of bold, even garish ambition that Eileen brings together with his from the Fishing’s exalted heart hides beneath a controlled, calm exterior. In that way, it’s just like its fantastically weird heroine. It’s always the quiet ones.