Eileen announces itself quickly, both in tone and in content, as smoke spills out over the opening credits, nodding to the title character’s car, which has a broken exhaust pipe that forces her to drive with the windows down. And then we cut to Eileen in her car, as she sits looking out over the sea, but really looking at a romantic couple nearby who are busy getting busy. And before things go too far for Eileen herself, she opens the car door, reaches out and grabs a handful of snow off the ground, and shoves it down the front of her pants.
Director William Oldroyd’s film is based on the novel by Otessa Moshfegh, and it follows a young woman who works at a boys’ prison, and who lives with her constantly drunk and increasingly erratic ex-cop father in a small Massachusetts town in the 1960s. Eileen is played by Thomasin McKenzie, who is very good at playing these soft-spoken types, and is very good here, although I am beginning to wonder about her range. One day, a new staff psychiatrist played by Anne Hathaway arrives at the prison, and Eileen instantly admires and is charmed by her, which is helped along by the psychiatrist’s apparent interest in Eileen and her brashness in dealing with a world made up of leering men.
But throughout, we feel as if something is lurking, somewhere, though whether that’s something out in the world or something inside Eileen we aren’t yet sure, and it could be both. And there’s a lurid enjoyment we get out of straddling the line Oldroyd creates between our attraction and repulsion, although there is one development that’s so repellent it’s hard to continue that enjoyment.
Where we ultimately end up is a little more muddled than it ought to be, and a little less unnerving than it wants to be. Still, Oldroyd controls the movie’s darkness with the slightest wisp of a mischievous smile, and even if this perverse coming-of-age story doesn’t perfectly come together, it’s worth the ride. Just keep your windows down.
Eileen is in theaters December 8th.
