Writer: Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh
Director: William Oldroyd
A homage to 50s thrillers like Mildred Pearce, William Oldroyd’s new film Eileen, showing at the BFI London Film Festival 2023, centres two intriguing female characters and a borderline admiration / love storyline that builds well before abandoning its carefully constructed character study for a rash and unlikely trigger ending that gives one of the characters everything she wants but leaves the viewer unsatisfied. Blending reality and fantasy, Elieen wonders how far an ordinary girl might go for a bit of glamour.
Working in a prison as a secretary, Eileen struggles to control her sexual fantasies about a male prison warden and later one of the inmates. Trapped by her humdrum routine and emotionally clipped by her alcoholic father, the arrival of a glamorous Harvard-educated psychologist, Rebecca, creates a new obsession that pushes Elieen to express herself more fully while becoming embroiled in the life of a prisoner.
For three-quarters of the film, Eileen has a great deal to offer both in the expectations placed on women in this small Massachusetts town and in the rich visual aesthetic that emulates the Technicolor crime thrillers of an earlier cinematic era. The creation of that era is precise, contrasting the bland and pastel utility of the institution where Eileen works with the dark, suffocating insularity of her homelife to create a character riddled with repression, quiet and observant but finding little meaning to her life or any future beyond the established existence that Eileen sees stretching before her.
The interspersion of fantasy scenes where she imagines alternative, often highly sexual or violent, outcomes are obviously a dream but the tinge of excitement, of a polished, free life that Rebecca represents is a fascinating relationship. Eileen leaves a lot of unanswered questions about Rebecca’s feeling for the title character – is she just looking out for another obviously downtrodden woman or is that a mutual attraction. Whether Rebecca is even real is certainly a possibility or someone who exists in Eileen’s fantasy world as an exaggerated version of someone she does meet is left to the audience to decide.
But the final part of the film loses track of itself and becomes too elaborate too quickly, a fast change of tone that takes the characters in an unusual and quite unbelievable direction with little substance. Rather than following though on the possibilities of a young woman discovering herself beyond society’s defined expectations instead feels like a confusion about how to finish the movie in which Oldroyd along with writers Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh go for a dramatic but unconvincing outcome to free their heroine.
Thomasin McKenzie is great as the quiet and overawed Eileen whose interior life is considerably more enticing than her real life, bound up with her intense adoration of Rebecca which builds nicely. Anne Hathaway puts in quite the turn as the free-spirited Rebecca, a woman with power, intellect and poise, able to set down the excessive attentions of predatory men but with an underlying fragility that the creative team steer away from too soon.
A film that just fails to become the taut and layered exploration of female lives and sexuality it could have been, Eileen unfortunately blows it with a big but deflating ending.
Eileen is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
