Sundance 2023: Thriller Eileen is a jagged ride full of beautiful turbulence

Eileen. // Courtesy Sundance Institute

“Some people, they’re the real people, like in a movie—they’re the ones you watch,” a grizzled man (Shea Whigham) gently tells his daughter (Thomasin McKenzie) about halfway through Eileen.

“Other people, they’re just filling space. That’s you, Eileen.”

Eileen’s cruel alcoholic father might be referring to her, but his words could easily apply to most of the residents that populate our heroine’s ‘60s blue-collar Massachusetts town, where the only prevailing emotions seem to be anger and despair.

Pulled back home years earlier to care for her late mother and quickly declining ex-cop father, she’s now a 20-something who lurks around the periphery of her hometown and the juvenile prison where she works, quiet frustration tamping down the unfulfilled lust and rage that lurks just beneath her mousy surface.

When we first meet Eileen, she’s painted in the warm grain of a Douglas Sirk film—one of the soundtrack’s many ‘50s ballads warbling as she sits parked in front of a serene, wintry lake. Then the camera pans to the real object of her attention: a pair of young lovers hastily hooking up in the car ahead of her. Caught in the act, a panicked Eileen slams snow down her skirt as her janky car begins to fill with smoke. Throughout its runtime, William Oldroyd’s (Lady Macbeth) adaptation of Otessa Mosfegh’s novel of the same name conducts that same slow-simmering dance with its viewer—lulling you closer before lashing out with an icy shock to the system.

It might not completely coalesce, but it’s a jagged ride worth embarking upon nonetheless.

It takes the arrival of a new presence to shake Eileen out of her funk: Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), the new prison psychiatrist. Stylish and worldly, Rebecca instantly stands in sharp contrast to the rest of Eileen’s blue-collar Massachusetts town, where the only prevailing emotions seem to be anger and despair. A magnetic Hitchcock blonde, she’s the type to saunter into a seedy local bar like she’s gracing a swanky Manhattan cocktail bar and launch into impassioned monologues in casual conversation. So when she takes a shine to Eileen, it’s no wonder the younger woman becomes obsessed.

“You remind me of a girl in a Dutch painting,” Rebecca tells Eileen over a drink. “You have a strange face, it’s plain but fascinating. There’s a beautiful turbulence. I bet you have brilliant dreams. I bet you dream of other worlds.”

With its swirl of holiday homoeroticism, it’s impossible not to compare Eileen to Todd Haynes’ iconic film Carol (or its source material, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt). But as its noir-thriller pedigree and twisty psychology really start to emerge in the third act, it feels like just as much a testament to Highsmith’s darker tales.

Eileen and Rebecca’s psychosexual fling takes an unexpected turn when they’re brought closer together on behalf of young inmate Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), a convicted killer whose violent murder of his father isn’t all that it seems. Hathaway turns in one of her best performances in years, finding wounded vindictiveness beneath Rebecca’s charismatic exterior. But it’s Marin Ireland as Lee’s mother who brings Eileen’s standout scene to life, in a vicious third-act monologue that echoes long after she exits the screen.

With her girlish demeanor and doe eyes, McKenzie makes for a sweeter, more naive Eileen than the often-nasty young woman readers meet in Mosfegh’s original novel. Her Eileen is a touch less bitter, instead starved for love and connection in a way that takes sinister turns when her adoration for Rebecca goes sideways. I found myself wishing for the occasionally meandering second act and the somewhat rushed final stretch to give her more time to make Eileen’s transformation feel less sudden, and help her work with Oldroyd (who directed Florence Pugh’s breakout performance in Lady Macbeth) feel a bit more intoxicating.

By the time the film’s almost-glib end credits arrive, I can’t say for certain that Mosfegh fanatics will be completely enraptured by how her aching, caustic prose has translated to screen. But as a showcase for Hathaway and the story’s own twisty merits, Eileen’s strange, smoky world is well worth a trip.