I try whenever I can to read material before seeing their film adaptations, fortunately a holiday landed just before the release of this years Eileen, a film I was very much looking forward to. It’s elements of noir, psycho-sexuality and period setting, along with its promising director and cast made this certainly one I was very much looking forward towards watching. This adaptation comes to us with a screenplay adapted by the author of the book herself Ottessa Moshfegh, paired with Luke Goebel, a thing that can either reap great results or disastrous ones. The outcome of this film is an incredibly faithful adaptation that in removing certain elements of the narration only adds with William Oldroyd’s flare for shifting between realism and fantasy. The catch is that all the things that worked in the book work here even better for me, but all the things that didn’t work, still don’t work, just slightly less so one must admit.

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Evocative, strange, sexual and darkly humorous; Eileen is a perfect character study for the dark Christmas nights it presents as its setting. Moshfegh’s two chief creations of the titular prison worker and the enigmatic psycho-therapist she grows infatuated with on the page are indelible, but on the screen brought to us by the immense complexity of Thomasin McKenzie and the immense charisma of Anne Hathaway make for a pair of figures for whom we as an audience grow immediately infatuated with ourselves. Both reek of such riveting un-knowability and such rich depth of character that the screenplay continues to deepen as the story goes on. McKenzie as Eileen is stunning and frequently unflinching in leaning into the darker and uglier sides of the character making the whole film all the more intriguing, playing on her face and with a few flashes of fantasy in the direction, the full length for my money of the original novels’ first person narration. Hathaway too is perfect here as the epitome of attraction; a smoking, alluring, seductive Hitchcock blonde who is equal parts goddess like vision and complex figure of confusion herself. The film struggles as the book does however with where it chooses to go with its third act mainly down to just how subtle, slow-burn and well crafted everything up to that point has been, the shift just remains to be of shock value rather than believability. I think it is being slept on too just to what extent Ari Wagner’s work as cinematographer is some of the years most beautiful and hazy work, again just as evocative and alluring as much of the other aesthetic choices. Oldroyd keeps a wonderful slow-burn tone until he eventually has to go the way of the book and I don’t entirely think he pulls it off, but for me it does work ten-fold better than it did in the original text. The work prior however, as was the case with the book, is just so very well done that one has a very hard job of dismissing it, as a matter of fact this is for me one of the most underrated films of the year and of course as I have already eluded to, one of the most frustratingly ‘near’ incredible – something that has only solidified more by the virtue of me writing this sometime after its release. Shea Whigham here too is sublime as Eileen’s drunken and despicable father and avoids caricature with a wicked touch. As a matter of fact most everything in the film is sublime, it is just regrettably hampered by a quote-un-quote twist that is the disappointing stone in the inevitable narrative other shoe.

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A sensually made 7/10 dark Christmas story for future winter rotations. Everything that made the book work so well is present here with a lot of wonderful additions in making for me the story, the characters and overall tale more fleshed out and more interesting – normally of course the opposite of the book to film experience. Oldroyd and Moshfegh have created an atmospheric and enticing piece of work that is stunningly well-made and despite having the same issues as I had with the third act of the book, it may very well be the case that repeat watches will have more success for me due to the regrettable fact that I have come to terms with where the story goes, so the suddenness and ill effect of it on a first go-around will wain and wain as time goes on, because I do think this is a film I shall return to.

P.S. I actually think as much as I have alluded to the fact that the suddenness of both the ending of the book and the film and its third act shift don’t particularly work for me in either case, it is a testament to the performance of Hathaway that makes the film’s version of events just feel a touch less dramatically out of nowhere and hence work for me a lot better.

-       -Thomas Carruthers