This adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel is not a story of repression, but something more prickly, more envious, and more dangerous

If you’ve seen filmmaker William Oldroyd’s previous film, the lovingly detailed and wickedly perverse Lady Macbeth, starring a pre-fame Florence Pugh, you may have some idea of the sorts of ideas and motifs the director is fascinated by. That film, too, was a psycho𝑠e𝑥ual smorgasbord of female desire smothered by the weight of the patriarchy.

Based on Ottessa Mosfegh’s 2015 novel of the same name (she helped adapt the screenplay, too), Eileen is set in the glum midwinter of 60s Massachusetts. Its quiet twentysomething protagonist is Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie, known for Debra Granik’s brilliant father-daughter drama Leave No Trace), who works as a secretary at a local prison. She lives with her verbally abusive alcoholic father (Shea Wigham, a brilliant character actor, particularly when he’s playing down-and-out macho men), but has a curious loyalty to him in spite of his frailties.

Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie in thriller Eileen (Photo: Universal)

It’s a ho-hum sort of existence, and the unformed Eileen – who in the novel presents as an increasingly unreliable narrator given to flights of fantasy – is bored and pent-up. And then: a new prison psychologist arrives in the form of Rebecca (Anne Hathaway in chic, sensuous Hitchcock blonde mode), a bright spot of intrigue and 𝑠e𝑥 in the workplace. Whatever sociopathic tendencies Eileen is holding down by the throat are released from their chokehold.

Eileen and Rebecca soon make friends, developing a relationship that borders on the secretly amorous – Mackenzie is great at playing women who seem even younger than their years, and her spotlight-big eyes as she gazes at Hathaway reveal her desire to both be and possibly to have the older woman. But this isn’t simply a story of queer longing or repression: this is something more prickly, more envious, and ultimately more dangerous.

Rebecca is not what she seems, and her tendency to leave a trail of devastation in her wake becomes clear to Eileen even as she continues to allow herself to be drawn into a web by this woman’s magnetic force. Filmed with visual restraint and gorgeous period accuracy for its clothing and manners, Eileen has a sinuous, absorbing rhythm until Oldroyd pokes holes through it with moments of shocking violence and criminal misdeeds.

Twisty and unpredictable, it is another entry into Oldroyd’s catalogue of feminine obsession and madness; he is a genuinely talented filmmaker, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.