Though Eileen is only director William Oldroyd’s second feature, he’s no stranger to stories about difficult women. His first film, 2016’s Lady Macbeth, was a thorny tale of marital dissatisfaction that put Florence Pugh on the map. This time, the eponymous protagonist (Thomasin McKenzie) is a lonely and desperately horny young woman who works in a children’s prison, begrudgingly takes care of her drunken ex-cop father and becomes enamored with the prison’s alluring new psychologist, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway). The story, adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel of the same name by Moshfegh and her husband Luke Goebel, is essentially a noir set in mid-’60s New England. And while Oldroyd delivers a frequently engrossing and twisty neo-noir, something about it just doesn’t quite gel.
Perhaps like any good noir, the first thing that strikes you about Eileen is how it looks. Cinematographer Ari Wegner’s images are textured and, frankly, gorgeous. The images are grainy with almost gauzy light that recalls the grit of mid-century film stock and you could almost imagine the film in black and white if not for the striking colors. Of course Eileen’s world shifts when Rebecca first appears, her red convertible is like a flame against the dirty earth tones of Eileen’s decrepit home and the prison’s cold blues. Likewise, Olga Mill’s costuming transports the viewer into the film’s world. Where Eileen’s clothing (all taken from her deceased mother’s closet) is shabby and ill-fitting, Rebecca’s is perfectly tailored, expensive. We understand that Eileen is a wallflower and Rebecca is a femme fatale without them saying a word.
That said, McKenzie and Hathaway’s performances are complex and perfectly calibrated. While McKenzie could play a shy girl enamored with a more glamorous woman in her sleep at this point given she did something very similar in 2021’s Last Night in Soho, it’s Hathaway who’s most enjoyable to watch. Though Hathaway played a different version of dangerous allure as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, she reminds us just what a star she is here. Rebecca has the glamor and mystery of a movie star. She’s liberated, driven and opinionated in a way Eileen is desperate to be. When the warden mistakenly says she went to Radcliffe, Rebecca interrupts to correct that she went to Harvard, disdainfully flicking her cigarette ash all the while. When a man grabs her on the dance floor at a local dive bar to stop her from dancing with Eileen, she elbows him in the face. There’s an element of danger to Rebecca that both fascinates and fills us with foreboding. We know from the flashes of imagined violence Eileen envisions and the way her father’s gun appears, Chekhovian, throughout that Eileen’s obsession with Rebecca will lead to ruin, but both she and we are powerless to resist.
Those who’ve read Moshfegh’s original novel will perhaps be relieved to see how much the film re-centers its focus on Rebecca. While Eileen is still undeniably the main character and the audience’s conduit to Rebecca and this world, McKenzie’s performance is far more internal. It’s a masterclass in restraint and suggestion, but so necessarily subtle that it may be harder to appreciate. Regardless, that refocus also allows the film to be far better paced than the novel. While the book wallows in Eileen’s repression, anger and desperation, relaying every bowel movement and violent thought she has toward her father (played by a toxic Shea Whigham here), the film emphasizes Eileen’s yearning and a building sense of dread. As Eileen becomes more obsessed with Rebecca and Rebecca becomes more fixated on one of the prison’s young inmates, we know that something bad will happen and much of the film’s fun is building anticipation about how those threads will finally mesh.
Still, much as Moshfegh and Goebel’s script solves the original novel’s structural failings, it can’t overcome its biggest weakness. What makes Rebecca so fascinating and gives the story its sense of foreboding is the anticipation. We know all this yearning, fantasy violence and dread will lead to something—we just don’t know what. Though the initial reveal will certainly draw gasps from audiences and the film’s last act is undeniably shocking, it’s also not nearly as potent as what comes before. Once we understand what kind of film Eileen is, its perversity and twists become almost cliché, the kinds of things we’ve seen in countless noirs before.
Though Eileen improves greatly on its source material, it never becomes something great. While the filmmaking is textured and transporting, it ultimately feels like all that craft is wasted on a narrative and characters that are only explored on a surface level. Even with excellent performances throughout and what’s sure to become a career highlight from Hathaway, the film leaves you wanting. Eileen isn’t a bad movie, it’s just a forgettable one.
