Eileen

dir: William Oldroyd

2023

This film… Does it actually exist? Did I imagine it all?

I bet you’ve probably never heard of this movie’s existence. I’m not saying this from the perspective of like a music vinyl snob sneering at someone in a record shop “you’ve probably never even heard of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, have you?” I mean it more from the perspective that this flick was made in the covid years, was released December last year and then the world acted like nothing had happened.

You know, like sometimes when you’re on public transport, and someone does something absolutely psychotic, but everyone looks away and tries to pretend that nothing happened, because they don’t want to draw the attention or the ire of the lunatic that did the thing?

I imagine that Eileen made negative dollars at the box office, if it was even ever released. I would not even know of the film’s existence if I hadn’t heard of a review from some other film reviewer who feels compelled to review absolutely everything that is ever released.

I understood absolutely nothing about this flick until the very, very end. As in when the credits started, and then I saw that this was based on a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, and then it all fell into place.

I have not read the novel this was based on, which was Moshfegh’s first published novel, but I have read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, so I have some idea of where she was coming from with this screenplay, which she wrote as well (along with her husband Luke Goebel).

But I didn’t twig on to this while watching the flick. If you know of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work, or you skim articles about contemporary literature, you would know of her name cropping up whenever there’s a discussion about “unlikeable” or “unpleasant” female main characters in novels, as in the heavily gendered idea that male characters can be absolute arseholes, and that’s fine, if not desirable, but if there’s a female main character who exhibits the same kind of behaviour or possesses similar character traits or motivations, then it’s unpleasant and icky. Ew, gross. Women have bodies? Ew.

There is something to that, though. Moshfegh doesn’t shy away from allowing her characters be gross or repellent, to others, to themselves or to us, the readers.

I didn’t really figure out that the main character here, who the film is named after, was drowning in self-loathing, but it’s hard not to think that something might be wrong. People would be mistaken to think that the actual main character would be the one played by Anne Hathaway, whose character’s name just happens to be Rebecca. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s also not a coincidence that Hathaway’s character sports a blonde do that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Hitchcock film.

Wait, damn, saying “a Hitchcock film” in a review, it’s taking a lot for granted. I can’t imagine there’s any people under 30 who would even necessarily know who that is, but then, I don’t really imagine people younger than me reading reviews.

I mean, it calls into question the whole point of writing reviews. Is there a point?

Damn, now I’m having an existential crisis.

Whatever criticism one could aim at this film, none of that applies to Thomasin McKenzie, who is, as always, the best part of any film she’s in. She’s a phenomenal actor who elevates everything she’s in.

She is Eileen, a young woman who’s meant to be 24, and who works at a boy’s juvenile detention facility. She kinda looks after her alcoholic ex-cop father (Shea Whigham, playing an arsehole again, after a career of playing nothing but arseholes), but by “looks after”, I mean she keeps bringing him the alcohol that keeps him stupefied.

When we first see her, she’s parked in a car in a lover’s lane type area, as people in an adjacent car get it on. She watches for long enough until she can’t stands it no more, and grabs a handful of snow to cool herself down.

At work, as she fantasises about being ravished by a co-worker guard (Owen Teague) and tries to rub one out, she’s again interrupted. She gets back to work, but not without giving her fingers a sniff first.

I mention this because this is the kind of film it is, this is the way Ottessa Moshfegh writes, and this is the kind of character study that it is. Consider yourself warned.

At least I thought this flick was a character study, until something completely bonkers happens at exactly the 1 hour and 7 minute mark. Up until that very minute, I thought this was a film about a somewhat disturbed, shy woman who was pretty much disconnected from life and the people around her, aching in her loneliness, still grieving for her mother, who’s passed on, looking after a vicious and mean-spirited jerk of a father.

When someone is saying that they can’t understand how someone could kill their father, she replies, emphatically “Everyone wants to kill their father”, with such conviction that, well, maybe not everyone but definitely some people. She often fantasises about killing herself, and, unsurprisingly, of killing her father. No-one could blame you, Eileen, not a jury in the world.

Of the many awful things her drunk father says, the meanest and nearly most accurate is that even within Eileen’s life, she’s not the main character. In her own story. In her own movie?

Enter stage left Rebecca (Hathaway). Confident, stylish, elegant, everything that Eileen is not. If we’re thinking about movies with single name titles, we’re perhaps reminded of Cate Blanchett in Carol, which was also a film that had, as its central plank, a story about the relationship between an older woman and a younger one.

Eileen is of course entranced by Rebecca’s ways, and even starts smoking just to emulate her. In the background something plot-related is cranking up, but we don’t realise it, because we think this is a story about how two women got together, back in the 1960s, in Massachusetts, of all places. And in case you’re wondering Thomasin does that Boston / Massachusetts accent just fine (although I confess there were a couple of times I thought she was doing a New Jersey accent).

Rebecca, right from the start, for me, was always too good to be true, in that I found her Katherine Hepburn intonations and arch manner of shutting down any disagreement meant she probably wasn’t who she said she was, which meant I had no idea what she was doing masquerading as a psychologist at the prison for boys. I was completely wrong, in that she is all that, but she does something at that point I referred to earlier which is flat out fucking nuts on almost every level imaginable.

And the way it is conveyed is not really through dialogue, with the camera pointed squarely at Eileen’s face, as she starts in one place emotionally, representing what she thought she was going to hear, changing profoundly as she understands that nothing she thought was going to happen, and something completely different is unfolding around her.

It’s true. She thought and I thought that this was a character study about a lonely, isolated person who thinks she’s found someone to either love or be like, but it turns out Eileen is just a cog in Rebecca’s demented plans.

I did not see that coming, at all.

Up to that point I keep referring to, over and over again (1h 07m), I thought it was a pretty strong film. It’s not a masterpiece, it’s not a revelation, but Thomasin McKenzie always reads the assignment and always gives 1000%. I could have watched hours of her trying to and failing to get out of the life she finds so stultifying in her shitty Massachusetts home town.

When the turn comes, well, it’s a completely different film, with a bonkers resolution that is no resolution at all. I had to look up a synopsis from the book to figure out how we were meant to think things transpired for Eileen after that fateful Christmas Day. The film gives us something that seems like escape, but all I could think of was “everybody involved in this is absolutely fucked, no doubt”.

Like everything Thomasin is in, it’s worth seeing, but, yeesh, it goes in a direction that’s horrifying and dark in the end, in ways that though they make sense thematically, left me feeling like “what the fuck does this have to do with these characters, anyway?” That’s just me; other people might find it more meaningful or organic than I did.

7 times Eileen should have set fire to the whole town out of 10

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“You…you really think you’re a normal person?” – well, not really, to be honest, but who does? - Eileen