"Eileen" Review: A Psychological Thriller That's Neither Psychological Nor Thrilling

Thomasin McKenzie shines in a movie that comes so close but ends up too far away.

December 15, 2023

No movie is responsible for its trailer. Marketers must make do with what they have; it’s not their job to present a film as is, only as it needs to be to make money.

As such, Eileen gets offered as a homoerotic psycho-thriller, and so we sit in a dark theater anticipating that. Saying it's not one would be insincere; technically, the film fits that genre and is thus categorized correctly.

Like many recent movies, if it was closer to the trailer, it would’ve been better.

Eileen Dunlop is a 24-year-old woman working at a correctional facility for teenage boys, the daughter of an alcoholic, verbally abusive former police chief, whom she cares for in the wake of her mother’s death. She engages in sexual fantasy with such vigor she masturbates at her workplace and is so desperate to escape life that she daydreams about killing herself and her father.

One day, a psychologist named Rebecca starts her employment at the facility, and her striking looks and sexual undertones excite Eileen, sparking a crush that entwines so finely with her latent psychological traumas that it borders on obsession.

Where that obsession takes her is a mish-mash of sharp choices and missed opportunities, creating a film that, while strong in many respects, feels too confused and non-committal to compel entirely on its own power.

Thus, what we can recommend feels isolated from the general idea of being commendable. Thomasin McKenzie lends Eileen a sensitivity just earnest enough to rope us into the film’s sense of plainness without compromising the legitimacy of a psychotic conclusion. Anne Hathaway has felt affected in every role since her Oscar-winning turn in Les Misérables, but it (mostly) works for a woman who is merely an ideal.

It’s the movie’s strong point. Within its matter-of-fact approach to Eileen’s life, we get the necessary insight and atmosphere to buy into a more demented final act. The film smartly holds off on revealing Eileen’s age until well after we see her endure her daily hardships and bond with Rebecca.

We know she’s old enough to purchase and consume alcohol, but Eileen's expert crafting of small-town dynamics leaves it open as to whether these purchases are legal or simply a matter of good faith, considering her father’s history as town law enforcement. By the time we learn she’s 24, we’ve already infantilized her, making her attachment to Rebecca more palpable.

She’s everything we envision someone like Eileen - armed with a suppressed, adolescent perspective on life, love, and sex - wanting. Rebecca flirts without overt sexuality, affirms without melodrama, and invites Eileen into new, vibrant experiences while normalizing them. What (emotional) teenager doesn’t want to have every feeling normalized?

It works particular wonders on Eileen, the type to feel obligated to an alcoholic father despite the torrent of abuse he rains down upon her and to feel that time can “fly by” while working in a prison. She’s isolated despite being surrounded by familiarity, yearning to escape while possessing zero necessary faculties to attempt one. Rebecca is not just an ideal, but her ideal.

So, as we sit, anticipating a twist of psychological thrills we know is coming, we feel that the refined approach to the first two acts will pay twisted dividends in the third.

Alas, it doesn't.

When Eileen sits with Rebecca in the kitchen, sharing cheap wine in a progressively strained conversation, it becomes clear that whatever Eileen envisioned these two would share is a total impossibility. Rebecca’s femme fatale persona has given way to something more conspicuous, and when she lets Eileen in on the reality of their present situation, the veneer shatters completely. Now, the movie must decide how much Eileen is what it portrayed her as and to what extent that decision will influence the outcome.

Sadly, though it gives her the necessary agency to craft a thrilling finale, the surrounding elements falter. In fact, that agency initially throws us; the first pull of the thread is not accidental, as one may anticipate, and the reasoning adds fuel to the film’s thematic fire.

Alas, it quickly dumps water on it.

Everything in the aftermath happens so quickly and with such assertiveness from Eileen that it feels less like the manifestation of a repressed woman’s obsessions unleashed than a confused conclusion about who this woman is, how deeply embedded her psychosis is, and how readily she should be able to employ it. If the film had drawn more connections between the desperate delusion that fuels her obsession with Rebecca and the mania resulting from so much chaos, the role reversal and how fully Eileen and Rebecca assume their new dynamic would’ve hit harder.

Instead, it feels almost like an unveiling of Eileen’s true nature or at least a commentary on what obsession can do to a mind aching for release. The film could’ve unraveled a bit slower and thus earned some masterful excesses, but settled for a quick, tidy conclusion it spent an hour earning the right not to use.

As the film ends, it makes clear that it wants us to reflect on Eileen’s journey and ponder the why of it all: what good everything did, what use this obsession was in the face of how everything unraveled. Sadly, such a conclusion would’ve needed more unraveling to earn that reflection.

Eileen is not bad. It’s not nearly what it could’ve been, essentially by choice, and nothing that chooses to waste its potential can ever be more than “solid.” Still, it’s a movie worth seeing, but in the general sense. All movies are worth seeing if they look halfway decent and not thrown together by an overgrown manchild reliving what he mistakenly believes to be the golden years.

Unfortunately, it spends so much time restraining itself, laying a quiet, commonplace foundation to make that proverbial slap across the face more imposing it forgets to impose when its moment arrives. All of that subtlety, taking us through the day-to-day of a woman that, though troubled, experiences nothing out of the ordinary or hints at anything outside the norm impending, would’ve been a well-crafted veneer if it’d elected to go nuts when the time came. Sadly, it doesn’t offer much when it decides to pivot, leaving us with a film that goes out more with a whimper than a bang and is, therefore, only a good movie that could have been so much more.