“Eileen,” based on the award-winning novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, stars Thomasin McKenzie as a young, repressed wallflower who lives in the shadow of her dead mother and becomes obsessed with another, more confident and sexually aggressive woman in the 1960s. Over the course of the film they dance together and become oddly close, and McKenzie’s character begins to adopt the habits and traits of the object of her obsession.
If that sounds an awful lot like Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho,” you’re very observant. To paraphrase the great Dr. Doofenshmirtz, “If I had a nickel for every time Thomasin McKenzie played a young, repressed wallflower who lives in the shadow of her dead mother and becomes obsessed with another, more confident and sexually aggressive woman in the 1960s, and over the course of the film they dance together and become oddly close, and McKenzie’s character begins to adopt the habits and traits of the object of her obsession, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Right?
But whereas Wright’s film was a stylish supernatural thriller, “Eileen” is a subdued character study. McKenzie, who plays the title character, lives in Massachusetts in the 1960s with her alcoholic, emotionally abusive, retired police chief father, played by Shea Whigham from “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” where he also played a policeman struggling to connect with his daughter after the death of her mom. Eileen works at a local juvenile detention facility, a job where nobody likes her, and she spends most of her time indulging her many unrealized sexual fantasies.
The perfect metaphor for Eileen’s life is her car, which vents deadly exhaust into the cabin whenever she drives it. Everything that’s supposed to make her life easier, or even just keep her going, is slowly killing her.