Director William Oldroyd’s piercingly good, wild-ride psychological thriller “Eileen” is not only set in 1964, but it feels as if it were MADE in that time period, with the production values, costumes, camerawork and even the acting choices made by the leads all feeling authentic to that period. It feels like we’re watching a Todd Haynes film as filtered through the lens of a Hitchcockian tale, with a late-story development that’s bat-bleep crazy but also gripping.
This is not to say Oldroyd, who helmed the Florence Pugh-starring “Lady Macbeth” (2016), doesn’t have a distinct style of his own. This is a well-crafted, tightly spun, finely honed piece of work. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s award-winning debut novel from 2015 of the same name (Moshfergh co-wrote the adaptation with Luke Goebel), “Eileen” features the New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie (“Jojo Rabbit,” “Last Night in Soho”), continuing to demonstrate her propensity for selecting terrific projects and her chameleon-like abilities to convincingly portray characters from various time periods and different corners of the world.
McKenzie delivers maybe the most compelling work of her career as the 24-year-old Eileen, who lives and works in a bleak, unnamed coastal New England town where if you so much as crack a smile, you’ll be regarded with suspicion. (As Eileen explains to a visitor, “Everybody’s kind of angry here — it’s Massachusetts.”)
At first she comes across as an unassertive wallflower but trust me when I say Eileen has layers. Initially, though, Eileen seems to be just going through the motions of life, whether she’s giving it about 60% at her clerical job at a local juvenile correctional facility, indulging in rather sad masturbatory fantasies or waiting hand and foot on her bitter and alcoholic and widowed father Jim (a typically great Shea Whigham), a former cop who spends his days and nights drinking himself into a stupor and berating Eileen for doing nothing with her life, even though he’s the reason she had to move back home. Some people are the ones you watch, Jim tells his daughter. Other people, they’re just filling space. That’s you, Eileen.
Eileen’s drab and gray life takes a sudden upturn with the arrival of one Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), the newly hired psychologist at the prison. Arriving in a red sports car with matching gloves and lipstick, her hair coiffed like a star, her figure encased in pencil skirts, Rebecca looks and sounds like she just walked off the set of a film noir. Rebecca’s accent is New York with just a touch of British, her demeanor is one of almost unnerving confidence, and even the act of smoking a cigarette or ordering a fancy cocktail in the local dive bar seems particularly dangerous and rebellious.
To Eileen’s surprise and delight, Rebecca takes a liking to Eileen, flattering Eileen’s potential, taking her out for drinks and dancing, even kissing. Eileen is a goner, but we’re not sure if Rebecca really has a thing for Eileen, or if she’s just bored to tears in this dull town and regards Eileen as a plaything to keep her amused. (We also begin to wonder: Why did this sophisticated, intelligent, Harvard PhD take a job as a therapist at a boys’ prison in this town? You’d expect her to be in Manhattan, charging exorbitant hourly rates to wealthy clients while living the high life.)
Things take a mad twist after Rebecca probes deeper into the case of inmate Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), a teenager who viciously stabbed his father to death while his father was in bed sleeping and his mother Rita (Marin Ireland) was next to him. What could have prompted Lee to commit such an unspeakable crime? Apparently, Lee has never spoken a word about his motives, and his mother won’t talk either. Rebecca is determined to get at the truth — and she enlists Eileen’s help, and we’ll say no more about what happens next.
Although “Eileen” traffics in entirely different territory than the new Netflix fim “May December,” Hathaway’s character and performance reminded me more than a little of Natalie Portman’s brilliant work in the latter film; in both cases, these Oscar winners are playing beautiful and charismatic and deeply manipulative people who swoop into town and become disruptors of the first order.
Hathaway and McKenzie click so well together, as we learn each is not exactly who we assumed they are. The only reason I’m not giving “Eileen” a higher rating is because there are a couple of cheap and manipulative jump scare moments that only serve to take us out of the story and feel frustrated. Other than those hiccups, this is a first-rate period piece thriller with hauntingly memorable performances.
