“Eileen” Doesn’t Deserve To Be Called “Carol for Psychos”

This review contains mild spoilers for Eileen. 

To call Eileen “Carol for psychos” is to view the 2015 film through the blur of its signature snow-paned windows; to reduce a work of sound and images to a plot summary.

Because, yes, like Eileen, Carol is about a quiet young woman who falls for an older woman in a fabulous coat around Christmastime. But Carol’s achievements are found in the subtle nuance of the characters, the poetry of Ed Lachman’s cinematography, the emotion of Carter Burwell’s score, the attention to detail and performance director Todd Haynes brings to every aspect of his filmmaking. Film is rarely about the what — it’s about the how.

I begin with this comparison because I’m struggling to parse out why William Oldroyd’s Eileen feels like such a failure. It has a stellar cast led by Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway, it has a queer story tailor-made to my interests, and it has a huge tonal shift that should delight the devilish side of my cinephilia. And yet, the film falls flat — its elements failing to cohere.

Eileen is about its titular character (McKenzie), a young woman who spends her days in a small Massachusetts town working as a secretary in a boys prison and her nights tending to her abusive, alcoholic father. She is bored and she is horny and she has a vibrant, violent imagination. Her world explodes when a psychologist named Rebecca (Hathaway) is hired at the prison. Eileen is immediately smitten, desperate to be and be with this confident, older blonde who flirts with ease and always has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth.

The film is based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel and co-written by Moshfegh and Luke Goebel. The two screenwriters previously worked together on Causeway, another movie with a queer protagonist that confused subtlety and emptiness. Read the Wikipedia synopsis for Moshfegh’s book and you will have a near-identical experience to watching this film. It’s not that loose adaptations are inherently better than loyal adaptations, but there should be some understanding that the mediums of film and literature differ. Lacking the explicit interiority of the page, a film must find the nuances of its characters, story, and themes in specificity. It’s this specificity Eileen often lacks.

There’s a moment midway through the film that encapsulates this problem. Eileen and Rebecca are at a bar, the only bar in town according to Eileen. It’s established that the bartender knows Eileen and her father. But then Rebecca tells some men who are flirting with them that her name is Eileen and Eileen’s is Rebecca. Who are these men? Wouldn’t they know Eileen already? How small is this town? This may seem like an annoying nitpick, but it’s representative of the film scene-by-scene, moment-to-moment. The setting and the characters fluctuate based on plot convenience. This is mirrored in the film’s craft. It looks great, it sounds nice, the performances are solid, but none of the choices feel inspired by character or story. One gets a sense of the kind of film this wants to be more than it actually fulfills its goals.

The mediocrity of Eileen wouldn’t matter if the film was just a deliciously twisted affair where Anne Hathaway looks sexy as hell in a blonde wig. The problem is the film’s self-importance. Set at a prison, featuring a subplot about sexual assault, and filled with discussions of criminality, reform, and repression, Eileen has lofty thematic ambitions. Unfortunately, its approach to these topics is confused at best.

Director William Oldroyd’s previous film, Lady Macbeth, was similarly broad. He gravitated toward a sense of depth without actually saying much at all. That film claimed to tackle issues of sexism, race, and power, but it did little except shout them with the nuance of a hollow Instagram infographic. Eileen has a similar problem. Its empty characters and muddled plot fail its serious topics.

I’d rather a film tackle serious subject matter with nuance rather than stating a point like a persuasive essay. But if a filmmaker doesn’t have anything to argue, they should at least have things they want to explore. They should have something to add to the conversation whether or not they reach any conclusions.

Ultimately, Eileen is evidence of what happens when we group films together without an eye toward quality. All lesbian films about two cis white women filled with angst and longing are not the same. All films that take big tonal swings are not the same. All movies that tackle subject matter like sexual abuse are not the same.

As audience members, we may be more responsive to some subject matter and types of films than others. But, ultimately, what matters most is whether a film is good. Eileen is not good.

Eileen is now playing in theatres.