Eileen (2023) Remarkable and Disturbing Psychological Thriller
“Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen”
Following a raft of purposely desaturated and time sensitive production credits reflective of the early 1960’s tale about to be told, we burst into the opening of the film accompanied by the dramatic strains of Richard Reed Parry’s wondrous musical score to the inside of a car and a camera angle peering through a slowly enveloping billowing of smoke from beneath the bonnet of the car and outside to a bitterly cold and frozen forest as “EILEEN” is dramatically displayed in the centre of the screen. As both the car and indeed the cinema screen fill with smoke we cut to the inside of the same car once more but now looking out upon a wintry beach, a sliver of rain can be seen through the centre of the windscreen where the windscreen wipers fail to meet as spits and spots of rain continue to fall outside. As we hear waves lapping the nearby beach we catch our first glimpse of “Eileen Dunlop” (Thomasin McKenzie) in the rear view mirror of the car and quickly her eyes, and then our eyes, are drawn to something happening behind her. That something is a couple in another car in this beachside car park making out on the backseats of the car. Amid rain drenched windows, the camera angle changes for the first time to the passenger seat as we see Eileen fully for the first time too and utterly transfixed by the couple now kissing passionately in the car nearby. Frequent cuts now: from Eileen gently moving her hands beneath the full view of the camera angle and back to the couple who eventually topple out of sight on the backseat of their car. Exhaling a gentle moan, Eileen is clearly masturbating as she opens her car door, scoops into her hand a small pile of urine stained snow before quickly stuffing this into her crotch as she leans back with a slight smile and another gentle exhalation of pleasure.
From a distance we cut to a car travelling on a road beside a gently curving beach as the first of the film’s incredible soundtrack kicks in with “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I am” by Nancy Wilson. As we pass a church the car sputters and backfires loudly before doing so again as with the light of the early evening fading to night, Eileen approaches home, smoke billowing from beneath the bonnet of the car. A later cut, darker now and closer still to home, we are back in the passenger seat beside Eileen as smoke continues to flow into the car. Barely able to breathe or see, Eileen is driving with the driver’s side window wound halfway down, the car a rolling mound of smoke as she finally reaches home and after loudly slamming the front door, an icicle crashes from the roof of the house and onto the pavement below. Still accompanied by Nancy Wilson’s truly beautiful song, Eileen immediately wanders into the lounge and without a single word for or indeed from her father “Jim Dunlop” (Shea Whigham), she simply collects a scattering of his empty vodka or gin bottles before peering into an empty refrigerator, traipsing up two flights of stairs to her cold, bleak and barely furnished bedroom in the loft and after secreting away some cash in a tin she lies on her bed, peering through her bedroom window as she eats a selection of wrapped chocolates. Or to be more accurate, she doesn’t actually eat them but rather unwraps them and chews them before delicately spitting each and every one back into their respective wrappers before we find Eileen asleep the next morning, her arm draped over the side of the bed and hanging limply over a full tin of half eaten chocolates and as Nancy Wilson’s song comes to an end, we now see a dowdy dressed Eileen arriving at work, passing through various security checkpoints in the juvenile detention centre she works in, before, for the first time of many in the coming film, idly stirring a hot drink as she watches a young offender hiding behind a wall in the prison yard as she obsessively observes him from her office window.
Five minutes in and the first words of the film jolt Eileen from her obsessive daydreams and into work as an assistant of sorts to a team of largely older and more mature secretaries in the prison. Chided as “useless”, “tired” and “I thought it was that time of the month” by the somewhat senior secretary on duty, Eileen sarcastically responds under her breath “at least I have a time of the month” before leaving the office to yet more tongue in cheek put downs from the senior secretary who sneers on her departure “You’ll be old like us, soon” as we cut to the strange serenity of a quiet waiting room as a host of families wait to enter the visiting room next door. Beneath a portrait of US President Lyndon B Johnson, Eileen conducts a pat down of the prison visitors before first leading them into the visiting room and returning alone to the waiting room, walking aimlessly until finally sitting on a chair with her back to the partition separating the rooms. Turning her head, she eventually catches the eye of a young prison guard standing watch in the visitors room and now noticing Eileen, the young guard eagerly storms through the security between the rooms before roughly and passionately pinning Eileen to the partition wall, forcibly making love to her from behind. We quickly cut to Eileen all alone in the waiting room, eyes closed and masturbating, before the prison buzzer shakes her from her daydreaming slumbers and quickly, Eileen leaving the prison at the end of the day and passing a retirement party in a private room in the prison she clearly wasn’t, and never will be, invited to.
We cut to the same curving seaside drive as seen in the earliest frames of the film but now at night before we find Eileen in a local store purchasing two bottles of vodka or gin for her father. The daughter of a recently retired Police Chief, a young cop offers to buy the bottles as a mark of respect for her father before the store owner asks about her day. Affixing a fake smile she replies with an unconvincing “good” but Eileen’s day is about to get a hell of a lot worse as her car limps and sputters and smokes all the way home before she finds her father, drunk and dressed in his pyjamas, shouting abuse from the middle of the street to any and every neighbour he can offend within earshot. After a struggle, Eileen is finally able to forcibly push and cajole her father back into the house in a familial role reversal of responsible adult daughter barely out of her teens and a man child of a father, depressed and drunk. Despite returning home with two bottles of alcohol gifted to him by a policeman appreciative of his service and by an attentive daughter looking after his every need, Eileen’s father is horribly verbally abusive, accusing her of smelling like “road kill” and despite settling him into his favourite armchair and ensuring he’s safe and secure with another drink at hand: “Maybe you should keep your distance”. Leaving the lounge, Eileen responds “Maybe you should be nicer to me” and “no-one else is gonna put up with your shit” and although storming upstairs towards the sanctuary of her bedroom, the verbal spat continues as her father compares her unfavourably to her older sister and “Get a life Eileen. Get a clue”. Largely ignoring the verbal abuse, Eileen collects several pairs of black shoes in her arms before we see her exiting the house, stumbling on the cold, icy steps, the collection of shoes flying in each and every direction before, with a huge sigh of resignation, dumping them in the boot of her car.
From the darkest of nights we cut to the following morning and Eileen once more obsessively watching the young inmate in the prison courtyard hiding behind a wall until he looks up and spots her watching him, to Eileen carrying three green bags of rubbish to a large outside bin. The third bag splits before she can hoist it into the bin, leaving a trail of detritus all over the pavement and Eileen’s tights and shoes. She considers picking up the rubbish but instead whispers “fuck it” to herself before walking to the corner of the prison grounds and the driver of the red sports car that raced behind her in the background as the bag of rubbish was spilling its contents all over her shoes. The driver of the car is “Rebecca Saint John” (Anne Hathaway) and the juxtaposition between the two ladies couldn’t be any more stark. Whereas Eileen is dressed in a yellow woolen checked jumper, dowdy green skirt and now dirty tights and shoes, Rebecca glides out of her car like a movie actress dressed in a checked sports coat, short skirt, high heels, red leather gloves, sunglasses and hat.
Unable to take her eyes off Rebecca, Eileen watches her every step as she approaches the entrance to the prison…
There you have the opening 12 or so minutes of Eileen directed by William Oldroyd in only his second feature length film to date following his debut with Lady MacBeth in 2016. Based on the 2015 novel of the same name written by Ottessa Moshfegh (who co-wrote the screenplay for the film with her husband Luke Goebel) Eileen is a film unlike any other I’ve seen for some time and a film that had me as hooked and as excited as last year’s The Substance and The Outrun. Hugely different films, I raise them only as a guide to how highly I rate this remarkable film but they also share that key ingredient of lulling you into believing you know the direction the film is heading in before jolting and shocking you into another and whilst you have one or two pieces of the puzzle fixed in place, there’s a left turn coming and third piece of the puzzle coming and yet, you won’t see the twist, and you’ll have to start the puzzle all over again.
The soundtrack? My goodness what a joy that is! Far too many tracks to list and enthuse over (as well as the score from Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry) but one song in particular broke me as well as cleverly developed the ongoing metamorphosing of Eileen from virginal white to her darker black swan persona, and her late night barroom dance with Rebecca to Art Neville’s “All These Things” is all this and so much more. Relaxed and comfortable within her own skin (and smiles as wide as any ocean) here is Eileen as happy as you’ll see her in the entire film and brilliantly shot by director William Oldroyd as we only ever see the smiling face of the dancing brunette ecstatically happy in the arms and nestling in the loving embrace of the deliberately faceless blonde. Eileen’s obsession, as well as her transformation into the beautiful idol she’s dancing with, is nearing completion.
Shea Whigham is wonderful in a distasteful supporting role as Eileen’s drunk and depressed father, but this dark and twisted tale of dreams, fantasies and obsessions hangs or falls on the performances of Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway and through two star turns, the film soars. The barroom scene above is pivotal for so many reasons and whilst I want to keep spoilers to a minimum, the swapping of names, the avoidance of any unwanted male attention, the transformation into the life and the lady Eileen aspires to be is also followed by a brief scene in the carpark that could be argued is as dreamlike/fantastical as so many of the scenes throughout the entire film. “You remind me of a Dutch girl in a painting”, Rebecca announces with a smile “You have a strange face. It’s plain but fascinating, with a beautiful turbulence. I bet you have brilliant dreams. I bet you dream of other worlds…”. Eileen’s smile is as wide as the nearby ocean, but not nearly as wide after Rebecca kisses her tenderly before leaving.
Eileen is a gem of a film. Treat yourself sometime.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon