“Love will make you crazy,” Eileen’s bitter alcoholic father tells he,r midway through William Oldroyd’s erotic death plunge to freedom (adapted by Ottessa Moshfegh from her Booker-nominated novel). Hell, don’t we know it. To hammer home the withering disdain in which he holds his daughter’s perceived non-life, Pops adds a devastating: “But you will never know that.” Little is he aware of the insane desire already flipping her lid.
Not the finest parenting technique, but dad has a point. Trapped in a desolately dull, late-Sixties Massachusetts town (albeit bathed in an ominous blanket of winter mist, for this is a noir after all), Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) is the drabbest of them all. Her days working a dead-end admin job at the local young offenders institution are followed by a nightly soul-crushing from her father. But… we’ve already seen Eileen with her hands, and stranger things, down her pants, pleasuring herself. A clear sign this mousey nobody might well roar.
Oldroyd discharges a couple of highly effective gunshot jump-shocks from Eileen’s fantasies to make it abundantly plain she’s a woman with urges. All that’s needed is a real trigger, say Anne Hathaway, to steamroll in as the impossibly glamorous new prison psychiatrist Rebecca (like the opening credits, a deliberate doff of the cap to Hitchcock), an alpha whirlwind of platinum hair and cigarette smoke.
Eileen is instantly smitten, surreptitiously burying her nose in Rebecca’s coat to inhale this alien creature. Perhaps because Eileen is impressionable, Rebecca takes her deep beneath her wings, offering a vampish, hands-most-definitely-on lesson in how to sling back Martinis and dance the sapphic dance at the local bar.
It would be lazy to make comparisons here with Todd Haynes’s Carol. Superficially, there’s an older blonde bombshell and a timid young thing indulging in a lesbian frisson – but that’s like saying Planet of the Apes and King Kong are similar because they both have monkeys.
If her father is the shitty stick driving Eileen away, Rebecca is the blazing carrot drawing her headlong towards emancipation. That moment accelerates wildly with “the twist”. There’s a basement. There’s an outlandish surprise. And however you thought you’d pinned down these two women, there’s quite the dizzying switcheroo.
Hathaway is superb as the femme fatale apparent, but it’s McKenzie, a constant brewing depth in her placid expression, who is the real intoxication.
98 mins, cert 15
