Eileen (2023)
7/10
Dark Brooding Film
24 May 2024
Warning: Spoilers
A lonely young woman who lives with her abusive alcoholic father works in a juvenile delinquent center. Her life is quite disappointing until she meets Rebecca, a charismatic psychologist with terrible boundaries. Eileen quickly falls in love with the manipulative, beautiful older woman and in her hopeful romantic naivete, Eileen pathetically throws her whole self into Rebecca with joy at finally having found a bright spot in her life. The film supposedly takes place in the 1960s but it looks very 1950s, and there are some very nice set pieces and light fixtures. There is an especially clever scene which takes place in a basement that screams serial killer.

This film plays on a lot of tropes like having a mental health worker who is just as sick or sicker than her patients, the poor closeted lesbian "taking the fall" for a straight or bisexual woman, and the manner in which children of alcoholics are susceptible to being attracted to narcissistic addicts as adults. It's very well done though. I wish I could give this film a higher rating but it twists and turns so abruptly that the ending is a bit unsatisfying. I definitely get what the director was going for in freeing Eileen from her literal and metaphorical prisons, and why it is more effective to position this story in Mid-Century rather than the present.

Anne Hathaway is actually convincing as an unstable narcissist, and Tomasin McKenzie is by turns heartbreaking and sinister.
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