Directed by: William Oldroyd
Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Shioban Fallon Hogan, Marin Ireland, Sam Nivola
The title character of Eileen is dead inside as the movie opens. She is spying on a couple making out in a car and stuffs yellow snow down her skirt as her version of a cold shower. Yuck, Then, she travels to her dead-end job as a secretary in a youth prison where she fantasizes one of the guards would just hump her already. Even these brief escapes are fleeting. Her father Jim (Whigham) is an alcoholic former police chief who despises her and wishes his other daughter would come and visit him. Eileen doesn't bother with makeup or even necessarily bathing. She just moves through her harsh existence in a cold, snowy Massachusetts town circa 1964.
One morning in the prison parking lot, Eileen sees a vision emerge from her car in the form of the new prison psychiatrist Rebecca St. John (Hathaway). Rebecca stirs Eileen's passions immediately, forcing her to straighten up so Rebecca would notice her. The glamorous doctor, with her blonde hair and quasi-Mid-Atlantic accent, seems as if she arrived from the set of a movie. She seems out of place dealing with teenage patients in a remote prison, but she notices Eileen and takes a liking to her. Rebecca asks Eileen out for a drink and Eileen goes home to shave her legs for perhaps the first time in a while and even wear makeup.
Rebecca and Eileen drink, then dance, then Rebecca leaves the bar with Eileen clearly wishing they could kiss goodnight. Color Eileen seduced, but then on Christmas night, Rebecca invites Eileen over to her home and this is where we think their romance will commence. It is not so. I won't reveal what happens, but the movie takes an unexpected turn from which it never recovers. Until the plot twist, Eileen was atmospheric and intriguing as we see two women feel each other out and approach a relationship.
But the love which dare not speak its name doesn't materialize, and instead the movie ends with unseemly haste as the first hour or so minutes dissolve into memory. We are left with no true payoff and I think we are supposed to be happy for Eileen in the end, or is the room being left open for a sequel? The three leads take complex characters and perform them superbly. They come from places in particular and we are interested in them, but then poof, whatever tightly held magic weaved from the buildup evaporates into...what the hell was that?
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