98 min | R | December 1, 2023 | Neon
Eileen Dunlop works a dead-end job at a boys’ prison and goes home to her drunk father. A glamorous new psychologist walks in and rewires her whole life. Then the movie shows you what was underneath all that longing.
Eileen Dunlop is a young woman trapped in 1960s Massachusetts. She works a clerical job at a juvenile prison and shares a cold house with her alcoholic father. Her life is small and repressed and full of fantasies she never acts on. Then Rebecca Saint John arrives as the prison’s new psychologist and Eileen falls hard. The film is about what desire does to a person who has spent her whole life pretending she has none. It is a coming-of-age story that curdles into a noir.
Thomasin McKenzie plays Eileen Dunlop as a watcher. She hunches, she stares, she swallows every impulse before it reaches her face. McKenzie builds the character out of small physical choices, the way Eileen pulls her coat tight or sits at the edge of a room. Anne Hathaway plays Rebecca Saint John as a Hitchcock blonde who knows exactly what she is doing. She turns charm into a weapon and lets you see the calculation behind the warmth. Shea Whigham plays Jim Dunlop as a mean drunk who still wields the authority of his old badge.
William Oldroyd directs from a script by Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel, adapted from Moshfegh’s novel. He shoots a New England winter in muted grays and browns that make the red of Rebecca’s lipstick feel like a threat. The production design buries Eileen in period texture, the wood paneling of the prison office and the frozen car where she eats lunch alone. Oldroyd builds tension by withholding it. He lets scenes run long and quiet until the silence itself becomes unbearable. The score works against the calm with old-fashioned suspense cues that promise a violence the images keep delaying.
Eileen works as a character study for most of its length and then asks you to follow it somewhere else entirely. The late turn splits the film into a before and an after. Some viewers will feel the pivot betrays the patient work that came before it. The performances hold it together. McKenzie and Hathaway play their scenes like a seduction where neither woman is sure who controls it. The film trusts its actors to carry the ambiguity, and they do.