Movie Review: 'Eileen'

Eileen (2023)

Directed by William Oldroyd

Written by William Oldroyd, Luke Goebel

Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham

Release Date December 8th, 2023

Published December 7th, 2023

Someone is sitting in a car on the side of a lake with smoke filling the vehicle. Someone is apparently committing suicide by smoke inhalation. The scene shifts back in time, the owner of the car, whom you presume is the person committing suicide in the opening scene. We meet our main character, Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) as she's in this same car, sitting next to this same lake but this time she's surrounded by other cars. She's alone in her vehicle while watching other cars where people are making out. She starts to touch herself but thinks better of it. Opening her car door, Eileen grabs some dirty snow and stuffs it down the front of her dress, seeming to quell her burning loins.

Sexual repression and inexperience has a big role to play, or so you assume, in Eileen as our mousy protagonist comes out of her shell when basking in the glow of an older and more worldly woman. Eileen works as an assistant secretary at a prison somewhere in Massachusetts. Her days are the same, working, going unnoticed, suffering from sexual frustration, and going home to her drunk bully of a father, a former cop named Jim (Shea Whigham). Having been retired or fired from being the chief of police, Jim now spends everyday getting drunk and waving his service revolver around.

Only Eileen appears capable of calming him down though her means of doing that is to fetch him a fresh bottle. Eileen's life is altered forever when she meets the new prison psychiatrist, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway, in full Hitchcock blonde mode). Rebecca seems to adopt the mousy and shy Eileen as the only person close to her in age and attractiveness. Rebecca seemingly seduces the inexperienced Eileen who realizes that she doesn't mind having an older woman attracted to her romantically. This doesn't go anywhere but, it does provide motivation for a third act twist that's intended to be shocking but feels more random, as if the story needed to create drama that just hadn't emerged to that point.

Rebecca is treating a young prisoner that she feels has suffered from abuse. She's outraged at the boy's mother, Rita (Marin Ireland), and wants her to admit that she allowed her late husband, the person the boy murdered, to abuse their son. Rebecca' hope seems to be that if the mom takes responsibility for the boy having been abused, he might just be able to get out of prison. Rebecca will go to an unexpected extreme to get this confession and drag Eileen into the fray leading to a seemingly inevitable tragedy that will bring us back to that lakeside and the carbon monoxide filling that vehicle.

Eileen is a rushed and exploitative film that teases a same sex relationship as more of a marketing hook than anything that might reflect the struggle of an LGBT person in the 1950s or 60s, when coming out was a dangerous proposition. The film starts out on a theme of a woman's sexual repression turning into an exploration but, by the end of the movie, this theme is buried under a convoluted murder plot that is perhaps a dash back to the safe space of a crime thriller and away from the complex and uncomfortable exploration of a distraught and confused young woman sexually coming of age alone.

It's a shame because it's quite clear that Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway are capable of telling the complicated story but are shunted into the true crime story as a way of introducing an easier and more conventional crime plot. It's cowardly and a cheat and it takes what was already a relatively shaky film that was living off the chemistry of its two leading ladies and downs them both in a sucker punch of a true crime plot that was intended as a subplot and became the main plot out of the weak will of the filmmakers and their inability to lean into to themes they introduced about young female sexual awakening.

Eileen is based on a book by Ottessa Moshfegh, who also has a screenwriting credit for the movie. The book is a wild proposition as it gets into Eileen's various awkward fetishes, her unhealthy obsessions, and even gross scatology. The film touches upon a habit that Eileen has for chewing on chocolates and spitting them out into the trash. The book goes into depth about Eileen obsessing over cleaning vomit from her car after a long night out drinking with Rebecca and this is also in the movie but not in any depth.

The filmmakers mentioned in a recent interview promoting the movie, a scene that they chose not to shoot where Eileen suffers an accident while in church, she has a bowel movement while under the stress of trying to control her drunken louse of a father. The book details these scenes fetishistically to explore Eileen's bizarre inner life. The movie either can't or won't go to these extremes and instead becomes a true crime movie as a safe way of getting around Moshfegh's more adventurous and unique book.

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