EILEEN - Mark Reviews Movies

Eileen, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 30, 2023

Eileen begins as a cold and moody drama about a young woman, trapped in the only life she has ever really known. It becomes, well, something else entirely, but to speak of it directly would be to ruin a genuine shock of a revelation.

What can be said more generally is that director William Oldroyd's film fully earns the shock, the shift in tone, and the complete change of narrative direction. That's because Oldroyd, along with screenwriters Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh, puts us so completely into the mind of the story's eponymous character that there's genuine, deep tension as a result. We worry for Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) before, during, and after that momentous event—not only because we know how vulnerable and wounded she is, but also because that openness and pain could have another consequence.

For the most part, though, the narrative, adapted from Moshfegh's novel, simply follows Eileen in her sad, lonely, and mostly miserable life, while offering flashes of just how much that melancholy, loneliness, and despondency have affected her mental state. In McKenzie, the film has a perfect match for the material, which requires that we accept a lot of seemingly contradictory ideas about who this young woman is and could be, and for the character, who is so quiet and passive that much of her development and evolution must be communicated through silent looks.

From the start, what we know of Eileen is that she lives in her childhood home with her father Jim (Shea Whigham), a retired police chief and terminal alcoholic, and works at the local juvenile detention facility, which houses boys and teenagers whose crimes apparently range from the petty to the severe. The poor woman is surrounded by the darkness of the human condition, essentially.

The only reprieve she has in her life is coming home from work, waiting for her widower father to pass out drunk in his chair, and go upstairs to the attic, where a cot and some chocolates wait for her. She doesn't even eat the candy—just sucking on them until she's had her fill of the flavor, spitting out whatever gooey remains there might be.

The setting is a small town in Massachusetts around Christmastime at some point during the 1960s, meaning that Eileen's prospects are pretty limited at the moment. She had to leave college after a year or less, because her mother became ill, so in terms of a career, it's likely more secretarial work, as she does at the youth prison.

She could get married, if she wanted—which wouldn't be unheard of, especially in this era, for a woman in her mid-20s—or if any man seem to have interest in her—which, since she's mainly known from the reputation of being her drunk and belligerent father's daughter, doesn't seem particularly likely around here. The other problem is Jim, who keeps close tabs on his daughter's life outside of the house—when he isn't drinking or pointing his service revolver at passers-by through one of the windows. It's becoming a problem that even his former colleagues at the police department can't ignore.

Oldroyd allows us to live with all of this, by way of McKenzie's subtly expressive but entirely informative face. There's also the chilly sparseness of Ari Wenger's cinematography, which gives these small-town New England compositions the look of a camera negative of some Norman Rockwell Americana or just recalls something like a less cheery Edward Hopper (which is saying something). One shot, outside the back alley of a bar late at night as the snow falls, is of such desolately familiar beauty that it more or less encapsulates the whole of this place and Eileen's own place within it, although the way McKenize's pale face pops within the shadows of the young woman's home emphasize her own imprisonment there and hint at the idea that there might be more to her than her surroudings.

There's definitely more to Eileen than the mousy, buttoned-up attitude she conveys, if the first scene of her, trying to not pleasure herself in her car while watching a couple make out in another, has anything to say about it. She's sexually curious, imaginative, and frustrated, and although day dreams of a guard ravishing her in a waiting room are one thing, the arrival of a new prison psychologist—a woman, much to the bemusement and amusement of most of the staff—opens up a new possibility and desire within Eileen.

The doc is Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), who is everything Eileen isn't—confident in herself, certain of her professional worth, free and generally desired when it comes to sex. It's difficult to tell if Eileen more wants to be with the newcomer or just wants to be her, but the two strike up a friendship of sorts, because they both desperately need a friend in their respective situations. "You must have brilliant dreams," Rebecca observes of Eileen, and she does, although a number of them—that don't involve sex—feature Jim's pistol being used at unexpected moments.

This story does a noteworthy job of convincing us that it's about Eileen's dead-end relationship with her father and all of the terrifying promise of what a bond with Rebecca could bring—with both Whigham and Hathaway embodying those characters with sturdy dedication. To be fair, most of the narrative is about those things, but they don't become the point of the minimal plotting that's contained with this tale.

That has to do with a prisoner, who stabbed his father multiple times next to his sleeping mother (played by Marin Ireland, who has a couple of scenes—one of such devastation and horror that it only solidifies the story's new route). Whether or not Eileen's casual observation that "everyone" has such thoughts has anything to do with the actual plot is unnecessary. She thinks such thoughts. We see her thinking them, and that fact, as well as the grim and claustrophobic atmosphere of both Eileen's life and her mind, says everything that finally leads her to the story's climax, what she does, and why she does it.

Eileen makes us understand Eileen with a potent sense of intimacy. More importantly, it makes us fear for her and fear her in equal measure.

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