Eileen is a slow, ponderous film that can’t seem to nail down what it is… until it takes a sudden left turn and becomes very much a different thing. Whether it earns that head-scratcher of a turn, I’m not sure…

The film stars Thomasin McKenzie as a young woman with fanciful or thoughts who is an office worker at a young man’s prison in in the 1960s. Into this drab, depressing, gray world comes platinum blonde Anne Hathaway and not a little attraction.

There’s a fair number of moving bits that don’t seem to matter except as a character study of this young woman. She’s attracted to a young prisoner as well as a guard, her dad is a raging drunk, and, of course there’s Anne Hathaway who slinks her way into her life. How these various jigsaw pieces assemble into a narrative is unclear.. and, indeed, for 2/3rds of the movie, it’s unclear there is an overarching story vs. just gazing at McKenzie’s face.

But it takes a sudden turn into sordid noire-ville that I wasn’t expecting. I wasn’t mad at it but I was a bit nonplussed since it didn’t feel at all like the movie I thought I was watching. Was it good noire? Probably a little… the film all along had a depressed, dark tone so switching genres wasn’t too radical… but, at the same time, it made me shrug and unenthusiastically say “well, I guess we’re doing this now”.

Yet I wasn’t bored and I was a little intrigued. The underscore of gloom and jazz kept me interested as I wondered exactly how far down this genre rabbit hole we were going. I ultimately wasn’t really happy with the ending… I’ll have to think about why it just kind of stops.

I’m a little on the fence but I enjoyed enough of it – even the risk it takes in the final act – to say it’s a pretty decent film. It’s not successful at everything it tries but I think its leading ladies make it work well enough.

Score: 77