At first, Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) just seems like she needs a little compassion. The title character of director William Oldroyd's Eileen is a shy, unassuming secretary in 1960s Massachusetts, drifting through her job at a local boys' detention center and her home life with her mean alcoholic dad (Shea Whigham), a retired police chief. If only someone would pay careful attention to her, she could blossom into a confident and happy young woman.
The truth is darker than that, though, and one of the delights of Eileen is its slow reveal of how twisted Eileen herself really is. She obviously has plenty of pent-up sexual desire, as demonstrated in the opening scene as she masturbates in her car while spying on a couple making out at the beach. That desire finds a new outlet when she meets Rebecca St. John (Anne Hathaway), a psychologist who's just been hired to work at the prison. The glamorous Rebecca, with her platinum blonde hair and stylish outfits, is an outlier in Eileen's drab town and in their workplace, the kind of male-dominated space where the warden introduces her as "Dr. Miss St. John."
While Eileen's fellow secretaries treat her mostly with contempt, Rebecca appears to understand her, to see the complex person beneath the surface. Eileen is immediately smitten with her, and McKenzie and Hathaway let their sexual tension simmer when Rebecca invites Eileen out for a drink at the town's only bar. Rebecca rebuffs the advances of the crude local men and instead dances only with Eileen. The period setting and the pairing of the brunette introvert with the fashionable older blonde evoke Todd Haynes' Carol, and Eileen initially comes off like a similar story of longing and repression.
In its third act, though, Eileen takes a sharp turn into more violent territory, in a surprising but satisfying shift. The dynamic between Eileen and Rebecca, in which the older, more experienced woman takes the lead, undergoes a transformation and remains unsettled for the rest of the film. McKenzie and Hathaway deftly handle the fluidity of the relationship, and their smoldering chemistry anchors the movie. The characters' actions may initially come as a shock, but the actors bring consideration and depth to every rash decision,
That's not to say that Eileen is a naturalistic film — like Oldroyd's bold, striking 2016 debut Lady Macbeth, Eileen is heightened and stylized, from its old-fashioned opening credits to the deliberately mannered performances from the two leads, both speaking in perfectly exaggerated Massachusetts accents. Marin Ireland makes the most of her brief spotlight as the mother of one of the imprisoned boys, delivering a monologue that's equal parts disgusting and tragic. The lush visuals, often bathed in shades of red, suggest the lurid, seedy world of film noir, and both Eileen and Rebecca fulfill the function of femme fatale at different points in the story.
As he did in Lady Macbeth, Oldroyd presents a sometimes monstrous woman as a figure of empowerment, bringing immediacy and a touch of nastiness to his adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh's 2015 novel. Moshfegh co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Luke Goebel, and the couple avoids many of the pitfalls of literary adaptation, giving Oldroyd the chance to show rather than tell — to use imagery instead of narration to get into the characters' heads. Eileen's periodic flights of fancy, in which she imagines sudden carnal or violent acts, are more insightful than any voiceover.
In the end, it's Eileen's inscrutability that is the most alluring, both for Rebecca and for the audience. The movie gives her the space to finally be herself, however dangerous or seductive that may be. ♦
Eileen
