Flasz On Film

After a nearly seven-year-long hiatus following the release of his 2016 masterful Lady Macbeth, William Oldroyd returns to the screen with Eileen. Adapted from the 2015 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, who penned the screenplay together with her husband Luke Goebel, this movie is bound to fly under most people’s radars because it’s just not your typical dose of escapist entertainment, nor is it an artistically resplendent piece adorned with radiant cinematography. In fact, the film Eileen is just like its titular character – easy to lose in a crowd, but it would probably have a lot to say if you bothered to ask the right questions and get it to open up.  

Hence, Eileen requires the viewer to pay attention. Not to the plot, which is fairly pared down, but to the negative spaces in iconography, framing and most importantly in storytelling. That’s because this whole film is best described as an experiment in trying to see how much character nuance of the kind you’d normally find laid down in paragraphs of descriptive text in between the lines of dialogue in any novel can be encoded using visuals and tone. And if you have seen Lady Macbeth before, you might have an idea about what kind of movie you’re getting yourself into when you decide to watch Eileen.  

To this end, we meet the titular protagonist (Thomasin McKenzie) when she’s in her car, observing a couple making out (or making love; difficult to tell) in a car. But then again, maybe we don’t because – as we find out a little bit later – the filmmaker never really lets us know when we are in the world Eileen inhabits and when we are in her head, observing what she sees, what she thinks she sees and what she wishes she could see. What matters is that it really doesn’t matter because the what of the story is of secondary importance. How the story shapes and changes the characters, on the other hand, is.  

Eileen is presented to us as a timid secretary who works in a juvenile penitentiary as a secretary, gets pushed around by her older colleagues and openly terrorized by her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham). She’s who you might call an NPC. Eileen is a bystander in her own life, a person completely devoid of agency, which is also something her father remarks on at one point. As if to spite her or force her into action. Probably to spite her, because Eileen is delineated through these little interactions as a human punching bag. She is a person seemingly put on this planet for others to bounce off of, as opposed to assert herself, let alone actualize. She’s Carrie White, but without telekinetic powers. 

Therefore, to combat the gruelling reality of living within the narrow confines of what other people in her life allow, Eileen spends a lot of time fantasizing. I would too, to be honest, because the prospect of being in the moment with the universe actively set up to work against my interests would most likely drive me to suicide. But everything changes when Eileen meets Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a new psychologist joining her workplace who is everything Eileen is not: self-assured, confident, accomplished, desirable. Rebecca immediately becomes a beacon of hope for Eileen, a lighthouse in the drab dullness of her own existence.  

However, what seems to imitate the character of Todd Haynes’ Carol with a hint of Brian De Palma’s Carrie – by the way, what a strange coincidence that all three films are titled after their central characters… – eventually spirals into becoming something else because Eileen is only partially a story about repressed sexuality or longing for acceptance. It’s a story about betrayal, abuse and the darkness of human soul around which Eileen’s narrative is wrapped, but we get to find out more about it only towards the end of the film when eventually the pot boils over, people show their true colours and Eileen is forced into unequivocal action.  

Without divulging too much, Eileen is quite a fascinating story. Not because it is innovative, narratively immersive, thrilling or suspenseful. Well, it eventually becomes all those things but even long before the narrative begins to snowball out of control, the movie is already magnetizing enough… even though not much happens in it. And that’s because the storytellers – both the director well acclimated to the idea of deliberately pacing a narrative and the screenwriters who were fully aware of where the beating heart of this story truly was – had an excellent grasp of the notion of breathing immense life into an otherwise rather literary text.  

You see, on its face, Eileen is very sparse plotwise. You can retell its primary narrative within two paragraphs and call it a day. But its story is way deeper than that. It’s a movie that resonates with you, stays at your side for hours and drives into you like a wooden stake because underneath its admittedly thin veneer of plot lies a whole universe of subtle nuances waiting to be mined and somehow transplanted into the language of the visual. Now, many filmmakers simply fail to do this operation with enough grace and instead choose to adapt important bits of character nuance – usually found in paragraphs of descriptions, inner monologues or ancillary character-building microscenes and nanodramas – into expository dialogue that any viewer worth their weight in salt will identify as artificial.  

Nothing of this sort is afoot in Eileen which instead encodes these important elements of character depth in those blink-and-you-miss-it negative spaces. They’re in the way Eileen picks up empty bottles after her father’s daily imbibings, like that obedient little serf. They’re in the way she sneaks a peek at the way Rebecca holds a cigarette. They’re in those inobtrusive flashes showing how Eileen attempts to imitate her, thus letting the viewer know she is attracted to her as much as she is attracted to the idea of being her. These moments are also everywhere else in the movie. In how Eileen reacts to being invited to a Christmas evening with Rebecca and in how nothing is made of the fact she’d be abandoning her recently widowed father on that day. We don’t need to hear a song and dance about how she’s grown to despise that man. We can connect the dots as long as the dots are left in there for us to connect.  

Which they are.  

Therefore, Eileen is a formidable piece of tonally subdued yet somehow resplendent storytelling, rich in detail you’d rarely find outside of a Todd Field or Todd Haynes’ written screenplay. At the same time, it is also a gripping study of abuse that asks the viewer to do enough legwork and figure out that what happens to people Eileen meets in the primary layer of the narrative we would also call the plot mirrors what happens in her own life, but on an emotional plane. It is a beautifully woven tale of brutal violence, screams muffled by a pillow and lips bitten down on so hard they refuse to stop bleeding. And it is all packaged in such a perversely lean vehicle that it just boggles the mind to think how much thematic content could fit into such narrow spaces.