Film Review: Eileen is a sinuous tale of baroque lunacy and suppressed desire

Set in 1960s Boston, Eileen (15A) opens with young Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) working as a secretary at a juvenile detention centre and caring for her father, Jim (Shea Whigham), a retired police detective who seems determined to drink himself to death.

Something of a Walter Mitty character who indulges in vivid sexual fantasies, Eileen is living the proverbial life of quiet desperation when a new psychiatrist, Dr Rebecca St John (Anne Hathaway), comes to work at the prison.

Bowled over by Rebecca’s glamour and elegance, Eileen is quickly drawn into the older woman’s orbit, and especially when she realises that Rebecca is equally fascinated by Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), a young man incarcerated for murdering his father in cold blood.

Adapted by Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel from Moshfegh’s debut novel, and directed by William Oldroyd, Eileen is a sinuous tale that slowly draws us into the baroque lunacy of Eileen’s inner world. 

It’s a story of suppressed desire, eruptions of violence, and the grotesqueries lurking beneath the banal.

The various narrative elements don’t quite gel — for example, the story lacks the courage of those convictions required to plumb the bleak depths of noir — but McKenzie and Hathaway are terrific here, both individually and in the chemistry they create as the characters gradually come to recognise their darker selves in the other.