Eileen’s first image is through a car windshield as the vehicle’s interior fills with smoke. Consider that haze a multifaceted metaphor—for pent-up desire, lethal suffocation, and liberating concealment—as well as a potential case of the ’s Jefferson White), and cruelly telling his kid that she’s one of the world’s many nobodies.
Oldroyd sets his scene with bleak hues, period-piece pop and R&B songs, and a score that feels like an ominous marriage of Bernard Herrmann and Frank Skinner—not to mention bold title cards that would be right at home introducing a Douglas Sirk film. It’s a drab milieu with sex and violence lurking just beneath the surface. Both begin bubbling up with the arrival of Dr. Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), a Harvard-trained bleach-blonde physician in high heels, a snappy little hat, and a cigarette perched defiantly, intoxicatingly, between her lips.
From the moment Rebecca pulls up in her red convertible, and then corrects the man presenting her to the staff with a self-assured smile that cuts like a knife, Eileen is entranced. Moreover, Rebecca realizes it and, looking for a friend in this new town, she strikes up a conversation with Eileen. Shortly thereafter, she invites her out for a drink at the only bar in town.
Thrilled by this offer, Eileen shows up in her mother’s dress and fetching make-up, but she’s still unprepared for the magnetic glamor, sensuality, and confidence of Rebecca, which doesn’t just sweep Eileen off her feet—it practically blows her away.
Hathaway is dazzling in these early passages. Her larger-than-life poise and cool invigorates Eileen, just as it wows the film’s title character. Eileen goes wide-eyed with delight from a pat on the knee and practically swoons when the doctor takes her out onto the dance floor, damn the looks from the watering hole’s toothless, charmless male customers. Eileen’s infatuation with Rebecca isn’t without its consequences, however; following her inebriated trip home, she suffers the wrath of her devout dad, and it’s not long before she’s gaining a reputation as another of her clan’s bad apples.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Nestled into Eileen is the story of Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), a prison inmate facing a murder charge for brutally slaying his father in bed. Eileen’s initial interest in the patricidal boy seems partly inspired by her own fantasies about killing her dad, which Whigham’s bastard tauntingly discusses with her, and which Oldroyd amusingly dramatizes without warning.
Rebecca’s curiosity about Lee results in a meeting with his mom (Marin Ireland), and it’s that thread which begets the film’s abrupt detour into more harrowing Tarantino-esque territory. There’s no way to discuss that right-turn without spoiling the proceedings. What can be said, though, is that Ireland nearly steals the show during her one big scene, segueing brilliantly from feral fury, to despondent contrition and pitiable resignation, to panic and terror.
Ireland shines brightly in her scant screen time, providing fantastic support for her leading-lady co-stars. Hathaway’s radiant charisma is laced with a subtle tinge of bitterness and hostility, the better to cast Rebecca’s cocksure attitude and against-the-grain ethos as middle fingers to a patriarchal establishment that only sees or cares about her beauty.
Eileen is the meek and needy flipside to Rebecca, if also a woman with a not-inconsiderable amount of rage, strength and ruthlessness ready to burst free from within. McKenzie captures her protagonist’s inner tumult with minimal expressiveness; right up to the thorny finale—which may be less clear cut than it seems—she conveys Eileen’s complicated emotional and psychological state through stillness and silence.
Oldroyd magnifies his action’s oppressive atmosphere via meticulously staged visuals; his use of constricting corridors, doorways, windows and mirrors articulate all that isn’t spoken aloud. While there are times when his stylization threatens to veer into noir pantomime, the director flatters far more than he imitates, and his stewardship is as icy as his story’s passions are fiery. With Eileen, he pulls off a unique and bracing switcharoo, in the process giving audiences multiple intertwined genres for the price of one.
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