Anne Hathaway Almost Saves the Day in ‘Eileen’

There comes a time in every actor’s life—or, let’s say, every movie star’s life—when they should forsake the stress of maintaining bankable relatability and just embrace the weird. That’s the thought I had while watching Anne Hathaway in the film Eileen, a curious literary adaptation from Lady Macbeth director William Oldroyd that premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday.

Hathaway is not the lead of the film, which is adapted from the Ottessa Moshfegh novel, but she is the driving energy of it. She plays the fabulously named Rebecca Saint John, a Hitchcock-blonde psychiatrist who’s accepted a position at a shabby juvenile prison in coastal Massachusetts, sometime in the early 1960s (or so). She immediately catches the eye of the film’s titular character, played by Thomasin McKenzie. Where Eileen is mousy, sour, furtively horny, Rebecca is a loose sophisticate, swanning into rooms and saying what she feels—and, it begins to seem, taking what she wants.

Given the obvious attraction between these two mid-century women, one older and blonde, the other younger and brunette, it’s easy to begin comparing Eileen to Todd Haynes’s Carol. There are echoes of that earnest romance here, but Eileen (given that it’s based on a Moshfegh novel) is a more sordid affair than that. Still, it’s a pleasure watching Hathaway do an addled riff on Cate Blanchett’s iconic object of obsession. 

This is a vein the actor works well in, sultry but with an edge of tenuous pretension. It’s ultimately not very clear who Rebecca actually is, how much of her smoothness is an act. She does messy things in the film, but even then she carries herself with an otherworldly glide that distinguishes her from Eileen’s small-town skitter. The film allows Hathaway to play two interesting sides, the costume jewelry and the real fur. It’s one of her most assured performances to date, saucy and fun but vibrating with grim tension. I’d watch her in a dozen more things like Eileen, so perfectly suited is she to the film’s mix of melodrama silliness and genuine grit.

Sadly, she’s not enough to sustain the film around her. Oldroyd’s oddball impulses serve Eileen not even half as well as they did Lady Macbeth. Eileen’s brisk 97 minutes conclude, jarringly, halfway through a sentence. The movie is deliberately alienating, but Oldroyd has not done enough to earn our devotion before he pulls the rug out and flashes us a smirk. The movie is a provocative tease that doesn’t have the stuff to back up the joke, try as its game performers might to make it all mean something. 

Complementing Hathaway’s grand flounce is McKenzie’s pinched, nervous energy, which she employs a lot more successfully than she did in 2021’s Last Night in Soho. Shea Whigham, playing Eileen’s alcoholic retired cop dad, gives good New England bitterness with a touch of the brute poet. (He’s almost as good at the regional accent game as the great Siobhan Fallon Horgan, who practically walks off with the movie after a mere few line readings.) Marin Ireland, a legendary downtown theater actor who’s been moving toward the center of the indie film world in recent years, delivers a vicious monologue with an admirable lack of vanity. 

If only the film better served its ensemble. Instead, it tosses away all that fine work with a snicker. It is possible for a movie to exist solely as a puckish wink and a nudge, a brief diversion designed to deliver a punchline. But the balance is off in Eileen; its blitheness is more inept than winningly insouciant. It’s rare to feel this way at a film festival, but I found myself wishing that Eileen was longer. Its fertile territory is woefully underdeveloped—so much of the film’s innate potential goes unutilized. At least there is Hathaway’s glowing star turn, both reminding us of what we knew she could do and introducing us to something new.