Review: ‘Eileen’ is a Neo-Noir About a Very Different Kind of Difficult Woman

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | December 5, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | December 5, 2023 |

Nobody seems to like Eileen much, least of all Eileen herself. Her drunken father constantly berates her, her colleagues either blank her or deride her as a loser to her face. It’s not as though life has much else to offer her in this dingy Massachusetts town where the sun never seems to shine and everyone is mired in some sort of filth, literal or otherwise. It’s the ’60s, but the decade’s frenzy of social change has swerved past this place. This is the existence she has, one she’s expected to deal with until she dies. Suddenly, in walks Dr. Rebecca St. John, the new chief psychologist at the prison for boys she works at.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s astonishing first novel exploded onto the literary scene and left people either dazzled or disgusted. You either thought the tough-to-categorize book was a brilliant examination of desire and desperation or an overrated plotless exercise in pointlessness. As you can probably tell, I’m on the former team and a true Moshfegh devotee. I don’t think there’s a writer working today who is so brutally efficient at detailing the ways that humanity allows itself not so much to fall into oblivion as sink into it with barely a sigh of recognition. Eileen as a novel immerses you so exhaustively in the mindset of its eponymous character that it feels smothering. In adapting her own novel, with William Oldroyd of Lady Macbeth fame behind the camera, Moshfegh and company have cut out the fat and left behind a lean, mean, and as proudly difficult as its title character.

As played by Thomasin McKenzie, Eileen isn’t quite as repulsive as she is in the novel, where her personal hygiene and attitudes towards her own body can only be described as unconventional. While something is lost in this particular adaptation decision, the curious ambiguity of the character remains. Often, she is highly sympathetic, especially when her bullying loser of a father (Shea Wigham) repeatedly tells her she’s no good, not pretty, and utterly meaningless to the good of society. She must retain the shreds of her dignity, concealed under her mounting rage, as he drunkenly gropes her and then flings the bible in her face. But Eileen is also the kind of woman who sits alone in cars and shoves snow into her underwear as she watches nearby couples kiss. She dreams of desirous encounters with a fellow prison employee but more often than not thinks about suicide or murder. Her life is grim but so is everyone else’s, and she often seems unaware of how much until Rebecca walks into her life.

Glamorous, with Marilyn blonde hair and a glass-cutting accent reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn, Rebecca is one of Anne Hathaway’s finest creations. She’s instantly alluring but also clearly phony from snout to tail. When Eileen’s father drunkenly talks about how the best people in love move like those in the movies, he’s referring to Rebecca, and she probably learned it from the silver screen too. Every cigarette is lit as though Rebecca is posing for Billy Wilder’s camera. Eileen is, of course, enraptured by this performance, even if it’s harder to discern why Rebecca would want to hang out with the cringey younger woman who doesn’t seem to know how jokes are told. Perhaps she is lonely. Maybe she needs something to keep her going on this dead-end town with one bar and not a single decent man in sight. Whatever the case, McKenzie and Hathaway are excellent together, a case of opposites attract (and repel) with the ambiguous intrigue of queer unsureness at its heart. When they dance, it feels like the only time anyone in this place has ever been alive.

The poster for Eileen gives away its noir-ish heart, and many of the publicity images seem eager to sell it as a darker take on something like Carol, and neither of these is quite right in encapsulating this narrative (although it is a handy reminder that Hathaway should definitely be in a Todd Haynes film since her work here feels perfectly pitched for something like May December.) To explain what Eileen is would be to reveal too much. Really, it’s not so much about the plot as it is about this abyss that every character finds themselves upon the precipice of diving into head-first.

Even without the agonizingly detailed first-person perspective of the novel (blessed be to Oldroyd and Moshfegh for not using voiceover to fill in those gaps), we get a full picture of this dismal place and what it does to one’s psyche. Nobody in the boy’s prison seems to think of these young men as worthy of basic human decency. Eileen’s father waves a gun around at school kids and gets a light slap on the wrist because he’s a former cop and nobody expects anything to change. The ways this rot of corruption seeps through Eileen’s life is especially effective. Every guy she meets is either a cop, a former cop, or a friend of one. The men are pigs and the women are, at best, complicit in it all. Even moments of seeming kindness are thorny, such as a man footing the bill for Eileen’s nightly purchase of her father’s alcohol. Cinematographer Ari Wegner’s lens seems half-tainted like a smoker’s teeth, capturing this sense of entrapment that only opens up when Eileen is on the road, her car’s amber lights illuminating little but the road right in front of her. There’s not much else to do, nowhere else to go.

If you haven’t read the book then I urge you to see Eileen knowing as little as possible. As the novel does, let its sense of distrust and push into the void get into your bones. It’s not what you think it’s going to be and that’s great. Oldroyd and Moshfegh want to surprise you. Why not let them?

Eileen is currently playing in limited theatres across the U.S. It will receive a wider release on December 8.