Clearly, these stories will thread themselves together eventually.
Is there queer desire here? Is she using Eileen - and, if so, for what? There’s a side story rumbling beneath all of this, involving an inmate at the prison (Sam Nivola) in whom the doctor has taken a pointed interest. The key to Hathaway’s performance, working alongside the wide-eyed, bushy-tailed Mackenzie, is that her intentions are almost immediately suspect. Something so simple as asking the other woman out for a drink feels more momentous than it probably should. Saint John takes an interest in Eileen, who, as Mackenzie portrays her, is hardly one to hide that interest. She breaks small rules in favor of the bigger picture, rustling the feathers of some of their coworkers at the juvenile facility while lapping up Eileen’s clear admiration. Saint John reels her and us in by being alive with style - a mode that Hathaway, well-cast here, relishes. Saint John is almost too easy to take for granted. Saint John - whatever its true nature - goes some way toward giving her one.įor most of its runtime, Eileen is about the curious pull between these women. Her dad ain’t shit, but as he would ask, who is she? She’s a woman in search of an identity. She discreetly masturbates at work and even gets off to spying on kissing couples - the latter is our introduction to her. She hoards and gobbles up candies when no one’s looking. Maybe it’s because of her nightly humiliations back home that Eileen is so eager to escape, mentally and otherwise. At night, she labors to weather the abuses of her alcoholic father (a very good Shea Whigham), a widower and former cop who makes a point of belittling his adult daughter. Eileen works at the juvenile facility in Boston with Dr. Eileen is played by Thomasin McKenzie: a twenty-something young woman trapped in ‘60s New England, flush with sexual desire, prone to daydreamy fantasies of carnal awakening and sudden violence. Saint John, and the more curious, impressionable Eileen of the title.
It’s a key to the tension rippling through the movie, which is primarily a study of two women: the magnetic Dr. That power is one thing that Eileen, which falters, gets right. She’s an unmarried, educated woman, progressive in her lifestyle, flirtatious and charismatic in ways that feel disarmingly knowing. Saint John has got something of that classic midcentury mystery about her. A Harvard educated Ph.D who’s arrived to turn this 1960s juvenile prison, the setting of much of this story, into a somewhat more psychologically informed place.
Saint John wafting in, tall, poised, cigarette to her lips. You notice it because the movie makes you notice.
Rebecca Saint John, one of the elusive anchors of Eileen, an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2015 novel. It’s the first thing you notice about Anne Hathaway’s character Dr.
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