Eileen: Sudden Fire, Sudden Danger

MOVIE INFO:

Eileen is a peculiar young woman — aloof and unfazed by the gloomy nature of her job at the local youth prison. But something in her changes the day that the new counsellor, Dr. Rebecca St. John arrives. She is instantly captivated by Rebecca’s glamorous, enigmatic presence. As the two women grow closer, Eileen is inspired to explore new facets of her own personality and desires. But her metamorphosis takes a twisted turn when Rebecca reveals a dark secret — throwing Eileen onto a much more sinister path.

REVIEW:

Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), is a woman trying to breakout out of her cage. She has a nowhere job as a clerk at a youth Penitentiary, lives with a berating alcoholic father (Shea Whigham) who use to be the town’s police chief, has a binge-purge relationship with guilt inducing foods (candy mainly). She’s bitter, repellant, repressed, and searching for a relationship that will liberate her, house her hidden desires.

Eileen meets her object of desire in chaos agent Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a Harvard educated therapist who’s super hot, with a life, relationship in constant ruins.

What happens is a psychosexual noir where a typical messed up heroine in the romantic comedy style (Rebecca} meets and tries to fuse with the typical horror villainess (Eileen). The movie filters the two genres through a fractured and dirty lens. Eileen’s potential is all horror aspiring to romantic idealism. It gives her a twisted but normal appeal. She’ll never be the movie’s savior, or even remotely in control. Her evil is of the accidental and impulsive variety.

The director William Oldroyd and the screenwriter Luke Goebel have added some twists to the Ottessa Moshfegh source novel that ramps up the action. Rebecca with her flirty, purposedly exaggerated femme fatale manner, her curvy semi-sexy outfits, is comfortable being the spurning attractant in this male dominated and abusive world. It’s easy to see why she becomes Eileen’s center of gravity, her obsessive focus, her dreams. It’s a crush, existing between wanting and being the object of desire. Rebecca is the fire and danger Eileen’s bloodless and cold water persona wants to truly be.

McKenzie and Hathaway are dynamite together. McKenxie plays Eileen as a girl in wid-eyed arrested development. Her flat personality registers as invisibility to everyone else. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”

Rebecca having been educated among mostly men has developed a bombshell casing for reasons easy to guess at. She’s pure femme fatale, absolute noir with opaque motivations. She is slightly seedy, and at heart, very lonely.

Oldroyd’s keen and objective eye is perfect for this tale of woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown because of boorish and violent men. The woman here have clearly bent themselves to fit the molds expected by men. This layers Eileen with discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. It may be realistic but it’s also mean. It denies her a girlboss-hood, hero-hood, or even the chance to be a good or bad example. There are no lessons, revelations, no good vibes. There’s only the horror left In the audience’s heart, the promise of invisibility and starting over again to relocated horrors of an ordinary, unfulfilled existence.