There is a strangely alluring holiday grubbiness to a lot of William Oldroyd’s psychological thriller, Eileen. The windows are foggy, but you can still see the large, holiday lights trying to shine through, and it feels like the pours of alcohol are a bit more generous given the season. This is a winter tale of desire hidden under the heaviness of a heavy blanket. Featuring a trio of the best performances of the year, Oldroyd’s film feels like the jagged intake of breath in the holiday cold–your sweat threatens to freeze on your neck.
Set in the early 1960’s, Thomasin McKenzie’s Eileen whiles away her time at a boy’s correctional facility by keeping her eyes down and fantasizing about the young male guards. The other secretaries (why, hello, Siobhan look down on her partly because of her youth, but her father, Jim (Shea Whigham), has a reputation around town of being a drunk. When bored at work, even her fantasies of hooking up with Owen Teague’s guard has a distant roughness to it–her face getting pressed up against a window as he has his way with her.
When Anne Hathaway’s Rebecca joins the prison staff as the new psychologist, a spark is lit within Eileen. This is instant attraction–both romantically and something more innocent. With her bright blonde hair and crimson crimson skirt, Rebecca appears right out of a noir film. She moves different than everyone else in this Massachusetts town, and you may begin to wonder why Rebecca is fascinated with Eileen in return. On her first day, we watch Eileen watch Rebecca from a distance, but then we realize that Rebecca has been watching Eileen just as closely.
McKenzie has a knack for playing young women who aren’t aware of the power that they possess. When Eileen borrows clothes from her dead mother’s closet, she might know how to wear them, but Rebecca can see the potential in her that Eileen is unaware of. Her shaky voice grows stronger and more assured, but she never loses the quiet innocence of a young girl who only experiences and observes life from a distance. Hathaway is having the time of her life. She curls around this entire film like a seductive spider. In the film’s final act, Marin Ireland, as one of the inmate’s mothers, delivers a monologue with so much texture that she almost steals the entire movie from McKenzie and Hathaway–that Independent Spirit Award nomination is unbelievably deserved. Ari Wegner’s cinematography makes this film feel like a poisoned candy cane. The bright holiday lights are meant to bring joy and brightness, but they might only illuminate the treacherousness of each of these characters.
With its lean run time, Eileen is a getaway car of a film. It feels dangerous and sexy, and just when you think it may swerve too far off course, the performances yank at the scruff of your neck.
Eileen is in theater now.
