Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Eileen’ on Hulu, a Dark, Sexy Noir-Thriller Starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie

Eileen (now streaming on Hulu) is a succulent and occasionally winking thriller starring Thomasin McKenzie as a mousy young woman and Anne Hathaway as the femme fatale who sets everyone’s heart aflutter and cockles afire. Director William Oldroyd adapts Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel of the same name and turns out a succulent psychosexual noir set during a mid-century Massachusetts winter, where the lighting is dreary and the comedy is bleak and hope is a thing that happens somewhere else. You sold on this yet? No? Well, read on. It gets better, I think.

EILEEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: HITCHCOCK. No he’s not here, but his spirit is in the opening shot, looking out the windshield of a car as the interior fills with exhaust and the score swells all Herrmannish. Inside is Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), who’s HORNY. Not just lowercase. She watches a couple making out passionately in another car then she reaches out the door and grabs a handful of snow and jams it between her legs. This might be a fantasy sequence, but it’s hard to tell – I believe it is, because usually with Eileen, her waking existence is so dreary and depressing, the only way to go is inward. Her car is so busted, it fills with fumes and will kill you if you don’t drive with the windows down. She lives with her father, Jim (Shea Whigham), who’s a goddamn delight, if you’re delighted by downtrodden widowers who are former cops forced into retirement because they drink way too much and now have nothing better to do than stumble down the street pointing pistols at the neighbors. Work isn’t much better for Eileen, either. She drudges along every day at a juvenile prison where all the other employees are P.O.’d Massachusettsians, and she imagines the hunky young security guard pressing her face against the glass and giving it to her good. Like I said. All caps.

One day at the prison, Eileen takes out the trash and the bag breaks and she gets disgusting blecch all over her. She goes inside and it’s the first day for the new prison shrink, and if you’re questioning the Hitchcock thing, well, question no more, because her name is Rebecca (Hathaway) fer chrissakes. She’s from out of town and has Marilyn hair and EYES and so much confidence, nobody around here knows where to put it all. Eileen takes Rebecca’s coat for her and waits until she’s not looking and buries her face in it and takes a big deep sniff. The brutal battleaxe who sorta runs things around here, Mrs. Murray (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), has staged the annual holiday play, Christmas in Prison, and warns everyone to behave because they never do during the program, and sure enough, about 90 seconds in, a brawl breaks out. From her position operating the spotlight, Eileen glances over the melee and catches Rebecca’s very amused eye. One little look from this woman leaves Eileen elated. You’d think someone gave her a million bucks and pushed her abusive shitbird father into a crevasse.

The next day at work, Eileen shuttles in visiting mothers, patting them down for, I dunno, files or razor blades maybe. One is Mrs. Polk (Marin Ireland), whose son killed a cop. A cop who was his father, mind you. Mrs. Polk and her son have an extremely rough sitdown with Rebecca, who could use a drink after that so she asks Eileen to join her later at the only bar in this sad-ass town. Over the mooooooooooon, Eileen goes home to run the evening gauntlet with her dad and shave her legs and put on her late mother’s best dress and dab on a bit of lipstick. Rebecca’s already a martini into the evening when Eileen arrives at the bar. “You must have brilliant dreams,” Rebecca says to her, because Rebecca is absolutely the type of human being who’s a shrink and says things like “You must have brilliant dreams” while looking right. INTO. You. Rebecca doesn’t know the half of it, because I bet Eileen dreams about the two of them doing squishy messy stuff to each other’s nethers. Rebecca and Eileen draw all eyes when they dance together, and when a pushy man tries to cut in and gets handsy Rebecca effing CLOCKS him one and then just keeps on dancing. They end the night pretty drunk and Rebecca leans in and pecks Eileen on the lips and Eileen drives home and wakes up in her own puke in the car which she nearly crashed into the house. Then she goes inside and fantasizes about blowing her own head off with her father’s gun. Such brilliant dreams.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Eileen is like Carol if it was a little more elusive and twisted. Tonally, it also brings to mind another excellent Cate Blanchett effort, the similarly artsy and borderline-lurid trash of Notes on a Scandal. 

Performance Worth Watching: McKenzie and Hathaway are as captivating as we expect them to be. But Ireland’s work is truly surprising, as she gets a soul-shredding deep-in-the-third-act scene that you won’t easily shake.

Memorable Dialogue: Rebecca on smoking: “It’s a nasty habit. That’s why I like it.”

Sex and Skin: A few incredibly horny moments that aren’t necessarily graphic, if that makes sense. Read: it’s kinda hot and kinda creepy but there’s no real nudity to speak of.

Our Take: Eileen’s father dresses her down just as Rebecca puffs her up, and inside her is a slushy cocktail of self-loathing and yearning for human contact that manifests as pent-up lust. A little positive attention leaves Eileen giddy with possibility, and more specifically, the possibility of straddling someone, anyone, until she reaches the Ultimate Moan. Otherwise, her existence seems dire and hopeless, mired in the grief of losing her mother and her father’s incurable despair. She’s messed up in ways left tantalizingly vague for most of the movie; we reach the halfway point and aren’t at all sure where any of this is going, intrigued by what extremes this character may reach.

That said, Eileen has opportunities to get wild and really go for it, but opts for restraint, sticking to the realm of pragmatic realism instead of indulgence. Stylistically, Oldroyd relishes period detail, shooting on film and enlivening scenes with an excellent throwback-jazz score. This is more classicism than neo-noir, holding to the tenet that you don’t introduce a gun in the first act without bringing it back around with gusto in the third. 

Again, it’s not the situations fueling our intrigue, but the characters. We may recoil at Eileen’s icky little fetishes at the same time we feel heartbroken for her emotional isolation. Whigham is terrifically loathsome as the father, deeply broken by grief and, most likely, a war vet’s PTSD; Jim is so pathetic, you can’t help but feel a sliver of sympathy for him even though he says terribly cruel things to her such as “You’re different these days. You’re almost interesting.” Meanwhile, Rebecca is all Rorschach tests and lipstick-stained cigarette butts, a woman maybe trying a bit too hard to hide her East Coaster accent and be erudite, independent and mysterious – and a little bit dangerous – wholly by design. Mixed together, these characters feel like gunpowder and a spark. Whether they explode or just sit in their respective corners and threaten to explode is beside the point. 

Our Call: Eileen is an unexpectedly captivating noir. The performances are rich, the intrigue palpable and the laughs very, very dark. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.