Eileen

In the void between Thanksgiving and the end-of-the-year pile-up that inevitably occurs in the final weeks of the year, a handful of releases are inevitably dropped with little fanfare. Some are hidden gems without a viable marketing strategy, others are nationwide expansions following earlier New York and L.A. dates. And then there’s the stuff like William Oldroyd’s Eileen: a good-looking, star-studded, bite-sized release that doesn’t really fit in anywhere else. As it turns out, a spot alongside the loners is exactly where Eileen’s title character would feel most comfortable anyway.

Christmastime, small-town Massachusetts, the early 1960s. Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) is an unassuming young secretary at a boys’ prison. She spends her long work hours doing busywork while trying to suppress persistent, obtrusive sexual fantasies. It’s about the only thing that adds spice to her day (save for the occasional fight that breaks out among the inmates). Things aren’t any better at home, where her ex-cop father (Shea Whigham) oscillates between raving paranoia and drunken belligerence. However, when the prison’s longtime psychiatrist is set to retire, some much-needed spice appears to finally enter Eileen’s life.

Clicking down the drab hallways and past the old fuddy-duddy staff, the arrival of Dr. Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) stuns. It’s not just Eileen who is left stammering around her, either. Her blonde bob and Boston brooding bring more excitement to the facility than even the most violent of scraps between prisoners. After some casual conversations and coquettish smirks, the girls seem to take a real liking to one another. This becomes all the more clear following some post-work drinks at a local watering hole, where Rebecca holds her own against some barstool brutes and ends the night with a peck on Eileen’s lips: This could finally be the escape from the mundane she’s been desperately searching for.

While 2018’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation might be the more well-known title in her bibliography, it was Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2015 novel Eileen that first captured readers’ attention. With four novels now under her belt, Moshfegh — along with husband Luke Goebel — has donned a new hat in recent years: that of a screenwriter. This long-gestating film adaptation of Eileen serves as the pair’s latest collaboration after last year’s underseen Apple TV+ Original Causeway. With this latest effort, audiences unfortunately get the trappings of a sophomore screenwriting effort and the foibles of a debut novel in one.

Like a worn paperback, Eileen has a distinct split between its first and second halves. Though not as visually pronounced as a cracked, flaking spine on a bookshelf, its major tonal shift around the midpoint is no less noticeable. Once the plot twists, there’s an obvious sense that this is going to be the thing that carries the audience through to the end credits. Still, one hopes that the story has one or two more twists in store before that ending arrives. Disappointingly, this isn’t the case. The rest unfolds exactly how one would predict.

In a novel — especially one written in first-person, as the source material is — this final act would be rife with rich interiority and inner conflict. On-screen, however, the inevitable trek toward the finale falls short of contemplative or profound. Don’t read this as a wish for voiceover narration or some other form of telling over showing. It’s just that the titular character and her twisted imagination are so quietly off-kilter that the lack of glimpses into her mind in these key moments — as seen on numerous occasions throughout the rest of the film — squanders the opportunity for a knockout close.

Everyone’s doing a nice job here, from a typically solid McKenzie performance to the scenery-chewing turns one always wants to see from Hathaway and Whigham, but it’s the very nature of unwaveringly faithful book-to-movie adaptations that ultimately bogs it all down. Not even the gorgeous camerawork from Oldroyd’s trusty cinematographer Ari Wegner — fresh from her record-breaking, career-best shoot on The Power of the Dog (2021) — can compensate for a mistakenly restrained approach to a story begging to act on its carnal desire and bloodlust.