Eileen – Film Review
by Brian Merriman

Director – William Oldroyd
Writers – Luke Goebel, Ottessa Moshfegh
Stars – Thomasin McKenzie, Shea Whigham, Sam Nivola

‘Eileen’, (with no Irish connotations) is the latest offering, adapted by and from the novel, by writers Ottessa Moshfegh, and Luke Goebel, directed by William Oldroyd. It is a psychological thriller set in a boys’ detention centre, in Massachusetts in the 1960s.

There is a strong sense of period in the costumes and settings. The sexism in the workplace and the chain-smoking are almost alien to a contemporary audience, but it firmly gives that sense of time, when women were beginning to rebel from the picket fence houses in the US to want to break free.

There is nothing stereotypical about Thomasin McKensie’s fine study of the title role. The Munroe-esque styling of Anne Hathaway as the new prison psychologist succeeds in throwing us off kilter from the beginning – it is a clever device. ‘Eileen’ is mainly a two-hander plot, supported well by Shea Wigham as Eileen’s drunken ex-police chief father and Marin Ireland as the unfortunate Mrs Polk, eventually caught up in a brief ‘Misery’ type scenario with two Kathy Bates!

The film is strange, it is about strange people and their stranger outlook on life, love and family. I’m not one into censorship, but the 15 guidance is borderline.

This is a thriller that keeps evolving with power shifts, seduction, and the exploitation of loneliness and isolation. The flashes from Eileen’s imagination to reality are managed well.

‘It’s always the quiet ones’ is an apt basis for this twisting plot and McKensie brings a quality to ‘Eileen’ that is beguiling and studied. Hathaway is in yet another genre, unimaginably far removed from previous saccharin roles of her early career. She does it with considerable style and abandonment.

There are good one-liners peppered throughout the dialogue, a very well-placed yet sparse soundtrack, and an implied underscore of same-sex attraction, used to manipulate and perhaps redeem.

At times, this film shines as a well-made art movie, and then it stutters to a ‘1960s made for TV movie’ (Film 4 is a credited producer), which lets it down considerably. Unfortunately, that’s what the audience leaves with, a sense of anti-climax in a challenging plot, aided by performances that broke new ground.

‘Eileen’ made me almost wish for a re-cutting of the movie and of course, an ending to match the intensity of the journey towards the conclusion. It almost gets there, but clearly, the writers and director had not agreed on a final destination.