Recently, Saltburn took us deep into the mind of an incel. It’s not the first movie to do so, which begs the question: What about the female incels? Society at large is neglecting them, possibly because there’s no evidence that they swing elections, but you can see how a story about such a woman could be just as fascinating and repulsive. Eileen arrives in multiplexes this week, and if it doesn’t quite nail down the “repulsive” part of that equation, it is a sleek period thriller with a homoerotic charge.
The movie is based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, the main change being the removal of the book’s framing narration from the present day. After the arresting opening image of a car’s interior filling up with smoke, the movie introduces us to our unlikable title character. Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) is 24 and works a clerical job at a boys’ juvenile correctional facility in Massachusetts in the early 1960s. She hates everyone, and you might too if you had her dead-end job and shared a house with her drunken, abusive ex-cop father (Shea Whigham), who likes to threaten the neighbors with his gun and tells Eileen he likes to imagine her killing herself. Eileen imagines this herself sometimes.
The one ray of sunshine in her life is Rebecca St. John (Anne Hathaway), a Harvard-trained psychologist who starts work as the juvie’s new therapist a week before Christmas. Rebecca is beautiful, glamorous, has lived outside Massachusetts, and vents her frustration with the narrow-minded prison authorities who won’t let her dose the boys with psychedelics. (“Don’t get me wrong, there is no magic pill. But the results have been fascinating.”) When a man gropes her at a bar, Rebecca floors him with an uppercut. Eileen is in love, and the older woman knows it and uses it to manipulate her. After Rebecca complains about New Englanders having no imagination, she stares deeply into Eileen’s eyes and says, “I bet you have brilliant dreams. I bet you dream whole other worlds.” If that isn’t enough, she kisses her shortly afterwards.
This is the second film directed by William Oldroyd, who introduced us to Florence Pugh in his debut film Lady Macbeth. These small-scale thrillers seem to be where he’s comfortable. The British filmmaker revels in the dinginess of both the prison and Massachusetts town that offers Eileen no creative outlet and a lot of people who are horrible to her. (Between this movie and Thanksgiving, Massholes are dominating our current cinematic landscape.) He keeps this affair at a lean 98 minutes without hurrying the pace too much, and the book’s killer plot twist loses little of its power, especially to those of you who don’t know about it.
Our New Zealand lead actress does well to imitate the local accent and has a funny scene in a bathroom mirror where she tries to slap herself into alertness. McKenzie is not ugly, and the part of Eileen that she doesn’t quite get is the part that feels herself to be unattractive, the ugliness that comes from within. Even so, she comes into her own after the aforementioned twist. Eileen thinks more clearly and acts more ruthlessly when Rebecca drags her into a sticky situation, and it is unsettling.
Setting her off is a bleached-blonde Hathaway, who turns her seductiveness all the way up here and yet also suggests that Rebecca isn’t nearly as self-possessed as she seems, letting out a savage scream in her house. Rebecca comes across as someone who makes sure everyone falls for her because she never knows when she’ll need them as an accomplice in a felony. For Eileen’s part, she discovers that love means being willing to kill for another person. She ends this movie by committing what I’m pretty sure is a straight-up murder, and that terrible act driven by love sets her free from her father’s authority and her small town. The world is full of new possibilities for her, which is the chilling note that the movie leaves us with.
Eileen
Starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway. Directed by William Oldroyd. Written by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh, based on Moshfegh’s novel. Rated R.
