The Oscar winner gives a pitch-perfect turn in an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s hit novel that doesn’t push its weirdness far enough
here’s a fantastically well-measured performance from Anne Hathaway in the strange, if not quite strange enough, thriller Eileen, an adaptation of. She’s an actor who doesn’t always find her sweet spot, admirably trying to show extensive range for a star of her high wattage, yet often not proving to be the right match for her material, big swings frustratingly filed away as big misses.
But Eileen isn’t quite sure what she wants or needs from Rebecca and then what Rebecca is willing to give her. With the setting, age difference and styling, there are obvious comparisons to Todd Haynes’s Carol, but the film is far less open about its queerness, in ways that intrigue but also frustrate. Eileen’s magnetic pull to Rebecca is hard-to-define in a way that many queer people can understand.
British director William Oldroyd, who announced himself by grabbing us all by the throat with 2016’s electrifying adaptation of Lady Macbeth, again fascinates himself with the story of curious women in desolate places, rejecting their given roles of the period and like that film, ultimately choosing violence instead of compliance.
Here, rather than indulging in anything quite as rich or murky, the women end up in a random, thinly developed crime plot that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense within the context of the film, leaving us in a less compelling and specific place than where we started, a boil reduced to a simmer. The earlier flashes of psychosexual strangeness fade and I found myself craving a little bit more oddity from a film, and characters, that hinted at a more daring and depraved destination.
It’s the last great moment in a film that then sputters to nothing. Oldroyd never seems entirely sure just how pulpy and weird his material is, unable to decide how far to push, the odd stylistic flourish and burst of lurid music ultimately feeling incongruous in a film that’s otherwise visually quiet. The effect is that we also don’t quite know what it is that we’re watching either, a film with its freak flag frustratingly flying at half-mast, all that curiosity waiting to be sated.
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