If you’ve seen director William Oldroyd’s previous film, Lady Macbeth, starring Florence Pugh, you might be able to imagine the ideas and motivations that fascinate the director. The film was also a psychosexual smorgasbord of female desires stifled by the burden of patriarchy.
Based on Ottessa Mosfegh’s 2015 novel of the same name (she also helped adapt the screenplay). Eileen The story takes place in the middle of dark Massachusetts in the 1960s. The quiet, twenty-year-old protagonist is Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie, best known for Debra Granik’s brilliant father-daughter drama Leave No Trace), who works as a secretary at the local prison. She lives with her abusive, alcoholic father (Shea Whigham, a brilliant actress, especially when playing desperate macho men), but feels strangely devoted to him, despite his flaws.
It’s a boring life, and the unformed Eileen, who emerges in the novel as an increasingly unreliable narrator indulging in fantasy, is bored and depressed. And then: Rebecca (Anne Hathaway as a chic, sensual Hitchcock blonde) appears as the prison’s new psychologist, a bright spot of workplace intrigue and sex. Whatever sociopathic tendencies have Eileen by the throat are released from their stranglehold.
Eileen and Rebecca quickly become friends and develop a relationship that borders on secret love – Mackenzie is great at playing women who seem even younger than their years, and her wide eyes when she looks at Hathaway betray her desire for both to be the best they can be. Take an older woman. But this is not just a story of strange desires or oppression: it is something more exciting, jealous and ultimately dangerous.
Rebecca is not what she seems, and her tendency to leave a trail of destruction in her wake is evident to Eileen, even as she allows herself to be drawn into the web by the woman’s magnetic force. Filmed with visual restraint and excellent historical accuracy in dress and mannerisms, Eileen has a meandering, exciting pace until Oldroyd punctures it with moments of shocking violence and criminal capers.
Twisted and unpredictable, this is yet another entry in Oldroyd’s catalog of female obsession and madness. He’s a truly talented director and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.