‘Eileen’ Is A Wild Thriller With A Vintage ‘Carol’-esque Aesthetic (Just In Time For Christmas) – Review

Known for her feral female protagonists, Ottessa Mosfegh’s debut novel Eileen is the first of her oeuvre to make it to the big screen. Set in the dead of winter in 1960s Massachusetts, the eponymous girl (Thomasin Mackenzie) works in a juvenile correctional facility. It is clear that she doesn’t belong; between the jaded adults twice her age and the disturbed boys half her age, she floats on by with mild curiosity at the abuses that go on, but there is no way out from this suffocating small town. It takes the arrival of the glamorous prison psychologist, Rebecca St John (Anne Hathaway) for her to imagine greater things. 

Director William Oldroyd, best known for shining a spotlight on the capabilities of Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth, plays casting a little safer with the established presences of Thomasin Mackenzie and Anne Hathaway in this two-handed thriller. What Mackenzie lacks in her forced Boston accent, she makes up for with her signature, baby-faced haunted expression that suggests hidden depths, while Hathaway’s almost old-Hollywood vibe, with platinum blonde hair and Transatlantic accent, does feel fake, here it feels intentional, presenting a charismatic but empty facade that cracks as the film progresses. 

Cinematographer Ari Wegner once again exacts a unique landscape, this time hazy with cheap cigarette smoke, billowing exhaust fumes from Eileen’s broken car and rolling winter fog, with pops of brightness and colour coming from Rebecca’s bright red car, scarlet lipstick, and the warm lighting of bar signs and street lamps. With an increasingly sultry and frenetic jazz score from composer Richard Reed Parry, the atmosphere of the film beautifully reflects how Eileen’s world begins to shift, and her heart begins to melt. 

Comparisons to the novel are where Eileen gets really intriguing; despite the book portraying an unlikeable and frankly grim main character one that is definitely a predecessor to Mosfegh’s later work My Year of Rest and Relaxation, this version feels almost relatable. While her eating disorder is marked by the way she chews and spits out chocolates in her room in both texts, book Eileen also has a horrifically basic diet, and relies on laxative purges for digestion and a bizarre sense of relief. Her perversion is toned down in the film to a voyeuristic opening shot, and an impromptu fantasy about (aptly named) prison guard Randy, while in the book, she spends her nights stalking him. 

In a somewhat disjointed fashion, the film replaces these more unpleasant characteristics with sudden shocking fantasies of suicide and murder, but again, this fits in with the sense of feeling trapped in a home with an abusive, drunken father. Of the cast, Shea Wigham, as Eileen’s father, is the most triumphant, as he stumbles around half-dressed and rambling, an alcoholic who is unconscious at his worst, and incisively belittling and controlling in his finer moments. 

Aesthetically, though Eileen wears her mother’s clothes in both, this film makes her more fashionable than frumpy, though a style a little too old and big, the unseen mother, who in the book is yet another source of abuse, becomes simplified to the source of a rather lovely wardrobe instead. The costuming is a key example of how, though the plot remains very similar, this film definitely makes choices to enhance viewer enjoyment to the detriment of the more unpleasant aspects of the novel. However, as the final act approaches, this gap closes, and both seeing what Eileen is truly capable of and seeing beneath Rebecca’s big talk is hugely satisfying. 

With an aspect ratio and old-fashioned titles that hark back to the time it is set, Eileen brings together a very repressive setting marked by violence with a transgressive, modern queer lens that will inevitably draw comparisons to Todd Haynes’ Carol. Though it replaces the anonymous retrospective narrative that implies none of the names are real, it anchors the narrative by focusing only on this cursed snowy betwixtmas week as Eileen is coaxed into emancipation. Though it perhaps doesn’t go as hard as it could, I suspect a director like Lanthimos wouldn’t shy against gorier details, but here Oldroyd has created a stunning, sultry winter thriller for the ‘be gay, do crime’ girlies this Christmas. 

Eileen is out in cinemas on December 1st

by Fatima Sheriff