Oldroyd will be the first director to bring Moshfegh’s words to the screen (a fleet of other adaptations are soon to follow, including Andrew Haigh ’s McGlue and Yorgos Lanthimos ’ My Year of Rest and Relaxation ), but he says that the author’s cult following did not intimidate him. There was hand sanitiser and everything.” Even now, says Oldroyd, the identity of the owner remains a mystery: “No one in the props department was prepared to share the information.” “I remember it was difficult to try and catch the pubic hair in the light,” says McKenzie with a laugh, adding that she “cleaned hands very well after that. In one memorable scene, Eileen retreats to Rebecca’s bathroom to catch her breath, rifling through the cupboards before spotting a single pubic hair atop a bar of soap. “Being ashamed of her feelings of desire and sexuality, being ashamed and disgusted by herself, and feeling unlovable – all of these things add up to her not allowing herself to feel that strong desire, to reach the climax of that kind of desire.” “It’s not gone into so much in the film, but she grew up in a very religious family,” says McKenzie. At its core, Eileen harnesses the particular discomfort of being a young woman uneasy in her own skin and uncovers its dangerous potential. Staving off desire is one of Eileen’s main preoccupations: chewing on sweets before spitting them back into their wrappers and, in the book, harbouring an unusual fascination with laxatives and their effects, a detail that was thankfully omitted in the adaptation. The actor, known for bringing a timid vulnerability to roles in Last Night in Soho and Leave No Trace, undercuts Eileen’s awkwardness with a simmering rage – finding the fury beneath a face likened offhandedly by Rebecca to a “plain but fascinating” girl “in a Dutch painting”. “I didn't realise until we’d actually made the movie that it was so similar.”Ĭompared to Florence Pugh’s steely Katherine, McKenzie says her character is much more “fearful of the world” – and strange. “ Eileen is about a young woman who has a difficult relationship with a male-dominated society – a society where women’s liberation hadn’t actually begun – on some level awoken by the arrival of another character who provokes this desire, this obsession, which is very similar to what happened with Sebastian and Katherine ,” says the director. From there, the film takes a sharp swerve into Hitchcockian territory, at once a painfully acute character study, a refreshingly female-steered noir – complete with ominously roving headlights and smoke (from a car exhaust) – and a blossoming queer romance.įor Oldroyd, this intoxicating mix of genres is not entirely new terrain, with his acclaimed indie hit Lady Macbeth tracing a similar story arc of patriarchally inflicted misery that ends in violence. Eileen’s drab daily existence is punctuated by wild fantasies that play out onscreen, from secretly masturbating over prison guard colleagues while at work to imagining holding her father’s pistol to her head and pulling the trigger.Ĭonvinced of her own ‘averageness’, Eileen considers herself a secondary character in her own story – until the blonde-bobbed, Harvard graduate Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), embodying everything Eileen believes she herself is not, arrives as the prison’s new psychiatrist. Like the explosive debut novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (who co-wrote the screenplay together with her husband Luke Goebel), Eileen tells the tale of a young woman (Thomasin McKenzie) stuck living with her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham) and employed as a prison secretary in a dreary, glacial nowhere town on the Massachusetts coast in the 1960s, whose mid-century misogyny and traditional values are yet to thaw. “You get her in a minute and a half,” says Oldroyd. Eileen watches them intently – before quietly opening her car door, scooping up fistfuls of snow, and shoving it down her trousers. We first meet Oldroyd’s eponymous protagonist Eileen spying on a couple kissing in their car, parked in front of a lacklustre ocean. Where British director William Oldroyd ’s debut feature film Lady Macbeth was about oppression, his second is undoubtedly about repression.
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