Movie Review: EILEEN

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: December 1st, 2023 / 10:21 PM

Rating: R
Stars: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Sam Nivola, Marin Ireland, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Tonya Patano
Writers: Luke Goebel & Ottessa Moshfegh, based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh
Director: William Oldroyd
Distributor: Neon
Release Date: December 1, 2023

EILEEN is a thriller that threatens explosions at every turn. However, when things finally go crazy, it’s in a way that has been set up well, but that we don’t see coming.

We’re in a working-class town in mid-1960s Massachusetts. Our title character, Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie), is a young woman who spends her days doing clerical work at a grim youth reformatory prison. When she’s not at work, Eileen takes care of her alcoholic, verbally abusive ex-cop father Jim (Shea Whigham).

Eileen is withdrawn and understandably bored and unhappy. She has vivid sexual fantasies, and spies on other couples engaged in sex, but otherwise doesn’t do anything to invite intimacy of any sort.

Then one day, Eileen’s world, and that of the reformatory, turns upside down. New psychiatrist Rebecca St. John (Anne Hathaway) is glamorous, free-spirited, frank, and not like anyone or anything the locals have seen before. Eileen is astonished and then ecstatic when Rebecca befriends her.

Eileen takes this new deepening friendship at face value. In fact, Eileen blossoms so much in Rebecca’s company that she is fun to be around. We’d like to believe in their relationship, too, but we suspect Rebecca has ulterior motives.

However, it’s unclear exactly what Rebecca intends at the start. Then something happens. It’s been perfectly laid out, but we don’t guess what it is.

Hathaway has the showier role as Rebecca, and revels in all aspects of it – the seductiveness, the wit, the brashness, and then other sides that we see later on.

But it’s McKenzie who anchors EILEEN. She has both the drab, inoffensive exterior and ready to explode interior life lined up absolutely in synch, so that we are never sure how she will handle or react to provocations or frustrations. McKenzie gives Eileen a full, rich existence. This is an instance where an actor’s sheer conviction is enough to make the character sympathetic. We believe in Eileen and what she’s going through so much that we’re ready to follow her anywhere.

Director William Oldroyd creates a very recognizable environment in all parts of EILEEN, so that we keep our bearings even as the narrative gears shift. The screenplay by Luke Goebel & Ottessa Moshfegh, based on Moshfegh’s novel, gives even the small characters gravity and reality.

There is a bit of imbalance in EILEEN. Without reading the book it’s hard to know if this may have worked differently as literature, or if Hathaway’s dynamism has shifted a bit of weight toward Rebecca, or if it’s just that we’re primed for stories like these to include the revelation. In any case, it seems like we ought to find out somehow what Rebecca at least supposes she is doing with Eileen at the outset. Yes, this is Eileen’s story, but Rebecca is presented as so much of a mystery that the film’s structure makes us expect an answer.

Otherwise, EILEEN has the benefit of an excellent cast, a confident sense of time and place, and a true element of surprise.

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A thriller with several big twists

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