Vague Visages’  Eileen review contains minor spoilers. William Oldroyd’s 2023 movie on Amazon features Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway and Shea Whigham. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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A film drastically less than the sum of its parts, Eileen commits the unfortunate blunder of continually reminding one of similar, better movies. William Oldroyd’s long-gestating follow-up to his acclaimed debut feature Lady Macbeth (2016) harks back to, at various times, Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015), a gender-switched Vertigo (1958) or the tricksy, morally complex central protagonists of New Hollywood directors like Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby or Barbara Loden (a link directly established by Eileen’s use of 70s-era idents for its production companies during the opening credits). But what does this all add up to? A whimper of a film, lacking in confidence or surety.

The narrative beats of Eileen’s plot promise a noir-ish and modern thriller. Adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2015 book of the same name, the film follows the titular character (Thomasin McKenzie), a secretary in a juvenile prison who lives a lonely, dull life with her alcoholic father (Shea Wigham as Jim) in a small town. The dreariness is punctuated by the arrival of Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a prison psychologist who, in spite of her stern job title, is a free-spirited figure of liberation. Eileen develops a semi-romantic obsession with Rebecca, until things take a rather more serious and sinister turn, and with plenty of sultry ambiguity as to what exactly is the tenor of the relationship between these two curious, out-of-place women in an otherwise conservative small town.

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Tales of psycho-sexual obsession are right up this writer’s street, which is why it’s so aggravating that Eileen is such a let down. The cinematography is imbued with this yellow tinge (suggesting drabness), as viewers are introduced to Eileen on a snowy day in the Massachusetts countryside, voyeuristically watching couples make out from her car and stuffing snow down her panties. Hathaway’s introduction is resplendent with popping colors, marking an obvious psycho-sexual shift. But the total impact of these elements are bloodless, aimless and obvious. It’s depressing watching a director marshal a number of perfectly fine ingredients and turn out a meal lacking any flavor. 

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Eileen is too repressed for the main protagonist’s fantasies and obsessions to ever explode. Oldroyd has little faith in his stylistic choices, so he continually opts for safer ground, turning to the tried-and-tested methods. The film is static, with compositions that only replicate the themes being stated in the dialogue while never developing them, with the occasional interesting image puncturing the dullness used only as set-dressing. 

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In McKenzie and Hathaway, Oldroyd has two accomplished and talented actors, both of whom do good work. McKenzie plays Eileen as a repressed, angsty figure, little more than a teenager despite being 24. She’s entirely convincing as a woman who acts much younger than she is. Hathaway is a star with the ability to light up the screen just by being in it, and duly she does. But Oldroyd seems terrified by this charisma and what it could possibly mean for Eileen (more so than the protagonist herself). The supporting cast, particularly Wigham, brings a rawness to the margins of the film. But it is as if the director opts to travel in the opposite direction to his characters — as they open up, fucking up their lives, Oldroyd’s direction becomes increasingly timid and nervous. When Eileen approaches what should be its climactic scene, it instead lands with a dead thud, bereft of energy, invention or provocation.

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Is this a case of that classic second-feature syndrome? Oldroyd would not be the first to follow up a promising debut with a clunker, but the problem is particularly pronounced with British directors; this is concretely an infrastructural problem with the UK’s film industry. Lady Macbeth was developed and funded, as so many debut features are, by the BBC and the BFI, but Eileen has taken seven years to reach the screen, with the end result being a US-UK co-production with some help from UK-based Film4. In between, Oldroyd has been attached and then un-attached to a number of projects. It is a common story: a promising first feature birthed by the BBC and the BFI, after which those two organizations seem to completely lose interest in the filmmaker, who then has to fend for themself in the ravenous wilds of independent film production. The history of recent UK cinema is filled with promising first-timers who then take far too long to produce their next feature.

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What happens then is that the next feature is made not with the freedom and abandon of creative liberation, but with fear and terror — the sense of a guiding hand that already believes it’s in last-chance saloon. This is not the right mind frame to be making a film in. Whether Oldroyd made Eileen with this mindset is largely complete speculation on my part, but look at the film itself. This is a movie made with fear and nervousness, as any sense of tension and provocation has long since drained from its frames.

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Oldroyd has stated in interviews leading up to Eileen that the long gestation period for the film was partly because he wants to commit to projects he truly believes in. This is a perfectly fine perspective echoed by many modern filmmakers who increasingly find themselves waiting years between productions. In this instance, many might invoke the name of Stanley Kubrick, who famously took increasingly long gaps between movies as he advanced in years. But in the first decade of his career after Fear and Desire (1952), the American filmmaker directed six features of varying quality. 

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Quantity doesn’t equal quality, but quantity does beget quality: you have to make and create, to fuck around and find out, in order to produce the best films. It’s practice. The film industry has changed radically since Kubrick’s early years, and it’s arguably harder than ever to keep a steady pace of work, as the industry’s infrastructure (certainly in the UK) is built in such a way to make this near-impossible. But there are stubborn figures out there bucking this trend, making a film almost every year regardless of quality. What’s particularly disappointing is when talented directors seem to approach this lack of quantity with an air of resignation rather than an air of defiance.

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What’s the final result of this resignatory attitude? Forgettable, middling work like Eileen, set to be forgotten as soon as it’s released. The British film industry has plenty of talented figures, but it’s being strangled by cowardice, both on the part of the talent and on the part of institutions. I long for something to change soon.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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