Eileen, dir. William Oldroyd ★★★★★
If you're a single 20-something, there are two overlapping ways to experience winter. 1: you embrace the magical festivities and celebrations memorialised in childhood, driving toward a collective nostalgia. And 2: you endure the SAD snuggling into your soul, with cold air and skeletal trees permeating your everyday. Despite Eileen having sprinklings of the first (often barely noticed in the background), the film is an all-encompassing, spiky embrace of the second. And for a while, the latter mood of the titular character holds your attention.
This is an adaptation of the Booker-shortlisted novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, a provocative author who often shows the lives of transgressive people. It’s somewhat refreshing to see a woman behaving badly, considering the cinematic onslaught of angelic or morally balanced female characters. The opening features 24-year-old prison secretary Eileen (a perfectly cast Thomasin McKenzie) in her car, parked at a rainy beach, watching a couple snog nearby. She stares, clearly aroused… then sticks a lump of snow down her crotch. The film is filled with these strange little shocks, escalating to erotic fantasies. But more than a high sex drive, Eileen clearly just wants to be seen in a world that's reluctant to look in her direction. Not even her former cop father (Shea Wigham), who’s turned into an abusive alcoholic, is all that bothered about her existence.
That isolation lifts with the entrance of new prison psychiatrist Rebecca (Anne Hathaway, seductively magnetic), who gives Eileen the attention she craves. But following Eileen’s growing obsession with this Hitchcockian blonde, the story shifts into a nightmarish tone involving knives, guns and blood. But how much of what we’re seeing is really happening?
After vividly consuming the first half with a curious, psychosexual character piece, Eileen feels annoyingly obliged to insert a Coen Brothers-like plot to accelerate the tension. It’s weird and fun for a time, but concludes without the satisfying scaffold of a third act to bring those elements together. And yet, the icy, detached and infringing brain fog of the film continues to swarm after leaving the cinema.
Photo: Universal
WHEN
From Friday 1 December
WHERE
In cinemas