Director: William Oldroyd
Writers: Luke Goebel and Otessa Moshfegh
Stars: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham
Synopsis: A woman’s friendship with a new co-worker at the prison facility where she works takes a sinister turn.
It feels like there’s a thick film of grime on the screen when you watch Eileen. So much of the film lives in the rank of the back alleyways of humanity. Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) lives in this world of harsh smells and filth that ooze off the screen like smell-o-vision. It’s hard not to want to cleanse your nostrils and just as you feel like it’s too much, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), shows up and the air becomes more bearable.
It really is a breath of fresh air when Rebecca shows up at the prison. Eileen is such an unlikeable, although pitiable, character that she’s hard to watch. Rebecca, though, as imbued with a fabulous, confident worldliness by Anne Hathaway, makes Eileen a far more intriguing figure by her interest in the young woman and suddenly brings to the forefront something Eileen has hidden away as she does her penance taking care of her father, Jim (Shea Whigham) in the wake of her mother’s death.
That’s the trick the script plays on you. Otessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel adapt the novel in a way that makes us think this film is about some kind of makeover or transformation for Eileen. She’s the Eliza Doolittle to Rebecca’s Henry Higgins. It’s only in the subtleties of performance and what the camera focuses on that we get a hint that Eileen isn’t all she presents to Rebecca and the world. She’s someone not even Rebecca can handle.
That’s one thing director William Oldroyd does very well in his adaptation of the novel. He creates excellent visual cues that activate our senses and our hackles at the wrongness of somethings. Oldroyd and cinematographer Ari Wegner create a dark noir vibe with mixtures of brown, red, yellow, and orange hues. The glowing of headlights or the bright neon of the bar sign cut through the dark winter nights and bathe our characters in their sins. Oldroyd and Wegner also show the inner desires characters would never speak out loud. Having Eileen alone in Rebecca’s office, putting her head on the desk and gripping the edge of the desk in desperate need. A need to be someone Rebecca could admire.
Eileen does function as a morality tale in some ways. Without going into too much detail as to how the story unfolds, which is difficult to do in a review like this, the cosmic shift in perspective that happens becomes a question of what would the audience do if they were in Eileen and Rebecca’s sensible pumps? The film captures the essence of the noir era, especially in its femme fatale, Rebecca.
Anne Hathaway steals every scene she’s in. She takes the role and disappears. Even after the turn, she keeps the attention of the audience because her balance shifts from a woman with all the answers to a woman on her back trying to save herself from the situation she’s found herself in. Hathaway is teasing, breathy, and bold in all the best ways.
It’s a difficult adaptation to do right, though. The novel, written by Otessa Moshfegh, has an unreliable narrator in Eileen. In the film version, we rarely know if a scene is true until another character reacts to it. This kind of language is hard to translate to the screen and the filmmakers don’t always pull it off. Especially the scenes of Eileen’s fantasies after she’s been given possession of her father’s gun. It’s troubling to be so in the dark.
Eileen succeeds as a mood piece. It has a strange twist that doesn’t land quite as cleanly as the filmmakers hoped it would. It may be because in this format the introspection has to come from the actors and some of it is lost in the translation. It’s worth the watch as William Oldroyd makes it a very visually interesting film, but its subject and darkness are not for the casual viewer.
