In Boston in the 1960s, the friendship between a young secretary living with her alcoholic father and her new single colleague takes a dramatic turn.
Theater director, William Oldroyd dazzled many moviegoers with his first feature film, Lady MacBeth (2016), adaptation of the novel by Nikolai Leskov where Florence Pugh shone in her first major film role. Camped in 1865 in an austere universe evoking The Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Lady Macbeth had as its subplot a manipulative relationship between an unhappy young bride and her maid.
We find in Eileen, written by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh, based on the latter’s first novel published in 2015, an echo of this unhealthy relationship which here turns into obsession. As well as echoes of Rebeccaby Daphné du Maurier, and by Carol, by Patricia Highsmith. In fact, with its film noir feel, Eileen distills a scent that is both sensual and sulphurous which makes us fear the worst for the protagonist.
Living alone with her father, Jim Dunlop (Shea Whigham), a widowed, alcoholic and paranoid ex-police officer, Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie, a clever mix of naivety and perversity) works as a secretary in a detention center for young offenders where she collects every day the derogatory comments of her colleagues. Tired of her dreary daily life, Eileen escapes into her sexual and morbid fantasies – which gives rise to scenes that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes shocking.
Then arrives Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway, perfect femme fatale), a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, proudly single, platinum blonde with impeccable suits who smokes with the grace of a Hitchcockian heroine. The visit to the detention center of Mrs. Polk (Marin Ireland, moving), whose son (Sam Nivola) killed his father, will disrupt the budding friendship between the young woman and her new colleague.
In the spirit of the novel, whose plot takes place during the week before Christmas in the 1960s, William Oldroyd creates a dark, gloomy, desperate world, where time seems to be suspended. Devoid of any nostalgia for the period, the artistic direction instead emphasizes the grimy aspect of the places, the dull outfits of Eileen, who dreams of a better life.
If the director manages to maintain the spectator’s interest in this drama where miserabilism rubs shoulders with macabre humor by gradually establishing an anxiety-provoking climate, the screenwriters threaten to make the whole thing collapse in the last scene, where they somewhat ignore plausibility in favor of an unexpected turnaround.
Indoors
Drama
Eileen
William Oldroyd
Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Marin Ireland
1:27 a.m.