In a small Massachusetts town in the 1960s lives an unhappy 24-year-old woman named Eileen whom this film is named after. This title character lives with her verbally cruel and alcoholic father and works as a secretary at a correctional facility for young boys. Eileen's dreary life gets an unexpected surprise when a glamorous, confident woman arrives to work at the correctional facility....and maybe make a new friend.
Although this film is set in the frigid days of Christmastime, nobody watching this will get a warm comforting sensation deep within their chest. This delicate friendship takes a nasty turn to a situation that is violent, secretive and criminal. Eileen is a desolate isolation story, but it's also a female noir mystery about the dangerous revelations we discover when judging others too quickly.
Director William Oldroyd had his feature film debut in 2016 with the stunning, sociopathic, period drama Lady Macbeth. Now with Eileen, he creates a pallid character study of a woman adrift in her own loneliness and repression who is triggered to make alarming decisions. By making the right choices on future productions, William Oldroyd could become a grittier, and riskier, 21st century successor to Douglas Sirk.
This film is adapted from the 2015 debut novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh which made a big splash in the literary world. (It was shortlisted for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize.) I know it's not helpful to compare films to the books they are based on, because they both function so differently in telling stories. But I do want to say the book has more ugliness than the film.
The book is dirtier and less likeable than the film, but that doesn't mean the film adaptation should be discounted. I was simply surprised the film appeared less severe than the book, especially since Ottessa Moshfegh was a co-screenwriter for this film alongside her life partner Luke Goebel.
The film's abundant use of shadows, jarring moments of gunshots, and long closeups of Thomasin McKenzie's (Last Night in Soho, 2021) rigid face remind me of 1960s films by Alfred Hitchcock (The Birds, 1963 or Marnie, 1964) and even Ingmar Bergman (Persona, 1966). I heard one of this film's stars, the seductive Anne Hathaway (Dark Waters, 2019), say in an interview that Eileen is like the 2015 drama Carol meets the 1992 crime thriller Reservoir Dogs. And I love that description.
Don't watch Eileen if you want to feel hopeful and energized afterward. But you will get a fascinating peek into a woman's psychological breaking point. In the desperation of being alone, friendship is not always a relieving solution.....sometimes it's a crushing one.
