Eileen review: This film hits the target with more than a hint of Hitchcock and Highsmith, writes BRIAN VINER
Eileen (15, 97 minutes)
Verdict: Moody thriller
SSome names are inherently more glamorous than others. Eileen, despite the efforts of Dexy’s Midnight Runners all those years ago, and despite the formidable Dame Eileen Atkins, suggests (if only to me) modesty, diffidence and anonymity.
The same is not true for Rebecca. There is mystery, danger and glamor in the name, which may have something to do with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film of the same name, which was so powerfully adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s novel.
Anyway, Eileen – the eponymous character in William Oldroyd’s carefully constructed psychological thriller – is an overbearing, dowdy, rather repressed young woman.
Played beautifully by Thomasin McKenzie, she lives with her emotionally abusive father and works in the office of a local juvenile detention center, where, when they don’t ignore her, she is routinely visited by her older colleagues.
But Eileen’s life and its possibilities change the day she sees Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), the institute’s new psychologist. From the moment she confidently steps out of her shiny red sports car and wears her peroxidized hair like Marilyn Monroe, Rebecca’s sexual attraction simmers like the scent of expensive fragrances.
Eileen, beautifully played by Thomasin McKenzie, lives with her emotionally abusive father and works in the office of a local juvenile detention center
But Eileen’s life and its possibilities change the day she sees Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), the institute’s new psychologist.
From the moment she confidently steps out of her shiny red sports car and wears her peroxidized hair like Marilyn Monroe, Rebecca’s sexual attraction simmers like the scent of expensive fragrances.
“She may be a sight to behold, but I assure you she is very smart,” the prison director tells his staff.
This casual sexism – notice the ‘but’ – is deep-rooted.
The setting is small town Massachusetts in the 1960s. In the White House, Lyndon Johnson has succeeded the assassinated John F. Kennedy, but there are no signs of social tumult to match the political, at least not in this neck of the woods.
Everyone knows their place, especially Eileen, although we are aware that she has a more exciting inner existence, as we are privy to her overwrought fantasies, some sexual, some violent.
After the seductive Rebecca looks at her – ‘you have a strange face: it is plain but fascinating’ – Eileen’s self-esteem gradually begins to grow, like tightly closed petals opening in the sunlight.
She becomes slightly less captivated by her father, a self-pitying, alcoholic ex-cop, beautifully played by Shea Whigham, and begins raiding her late mother’s closet for clothes that might attract attention. Especially Rebecca’s head.
By the time they dance together in a bar one evening, the older woman’s affection for Eileen begins to imply the almost unthinkable: that the relationship leads inexorably to the bedroom. Eileen, for her part, is quite in love.
Hathaway, a movie star whose rom-com past sometimes denies her the status she deserves as an actress of real consequence, is wonderful as the refined Rebecca.
But it is the talented young New Zealander McKenzie who provides the truly eye-catching performance in this film.
I loved her in Last Night In Soho (2021), making the most of a role that required her to be unworldly and impressionable. Her character in Eileen is not that different, but it slowly and seductively becomes clear that she is not nearly as guileless as she seems.
Hathaway, a movie star whose rom-com past sometimes denies her the status she deserves as an actress of real consequence, is wonderful as the refined Rebecca.
By the time they dance together in a bar one evening, the older woman’s affection for Eileen begins to imply the almost unthinkable: that the relationship leads inexorably to the bedroom.
Everyone knows their place, especially Eileen, although we are aware that she has a more exciting inner existence because we are privy to her overwrought fantasies
Oldroyd explored similar territory in his thrilling feature debut Lady Macbeth (2016), about a young woman in Victorian England who, forced into a desperately unhappy marriage, proves to be energetic enough to break out of her social straitjacket.
It was based on a Russian novel and this film (moodyly shot by the same cinematographer, Ari Wegner) also has literary roots, in the novel of the same name by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Moshfegh, along with her husband Luke Goebel, adapted the screenplay themselves, and whether she and Oldroyd intended it or not, the story has resounding echoes of Patricia Highsmith’s, and indeed Alfred Hitchcock. Because there is more going on here than just an intense relationship between two women.
In prison, Rebecca becomes increasingly preoccupied with the case of a teenage boy, Leo (played by Sam Nivola, Emily Mortimer’s son), who stabbed his father to death.
She is determined to learn more about his motivations and the family circumstances that led him to commit the murder while his father lay in bed next to his mother (Marin Ireland).
In ways I’m not allowed to reveal here, Rebecca’s fixation begins to reveal that she is much more vulnerable than she seems, and Eileen much stronger. Which of course just shows what nonsense it is to link character traits to a name.