Eileen review: Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway make a thrilling pair

Thomasin McKenzie, right, with Anne Hathaway in Eileen.

Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.

Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labelled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of Barbie, more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.

The pleasure of Eileen is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.

The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some grey, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional centre is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)

One day right before Christmas, the new prison counsellor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasises her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetising. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her centre of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.

McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candour, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”

So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, although more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasises, Radcliffe) in early ‘60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.

These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signalled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behaviour: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on faecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)

But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller Lady Macbeth, introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit moulds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.

All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned Barbie, the forthcoming Poor Things, among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.

Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Alissa Wilkinson

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