Eileen evaluate – Anne Hathaway is vehement in solemnly extreme psycho-noir

right here’s a extraordinary misfire of a psycho-noir, for which Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh have co-tailored Moshfegh’s Booker-shortlisted novel of the same identify and William Oldroyd directs. It’s acted and offered with a weirdly solemn intensity, like a deadly serious remake of some lost John Waters pulp traditional. Gif immortality beckons for the weird second through which Anne Hathaway’s persona grapples with what appears worryingly like a fake cat, throwing it out of the entrance door with a yowling noise on the soundtrack.

The surroundings is a small Massachusetts city in the early 60s, and Thomasin McKenzie plays Eileen, a mousy and repressed young girl working as a submitting assistant at a juvenile detention center. At home she is conveniently the carer for her aggressively alcoholic widowed father Jim (Shea Whigham), an ex-cop who likes to get inebriated, brandish his gun on the neighbours and humiliate Eileen. For her half, Eileen has repeated reveries of sex, vengeful violence and self-damage: weird micro-fantasies that are startling at the beginning, but also verging on the clumsy and which undermine the affect of a real-world plot-twist to come.

For motives she can’t rather take into account, Eileen is emotionally delighted with the aid of the new consultant psychologist that the prison has employed: Dr Rebecca Saint John (Hathaway), a classy and complex Harvard-educated girl with liberal ideas and dyed blonde hair who invitations timid Eileen out for cocktails, clearly amused at the manner this younger woman is probably going to blossom beneath her tips. And just when the film looks like it’s going to ape Todd Haynes’s version of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol, with Hathaway within the Cate Blanchett role and McKenzie taking the submissive Rooney Mara part, whatever very bizarre and melodramatic occurs.

This movie certainly has its moments: it's hilarious when the hatchet-confronted detention center supervisor Mrs Murray (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) forces the mutinous younger prisoners to monitor the religious xmas competition she has laid on for his or her edification, grimly entitled Christmas in reformatory. it is deliberately funny, however I’m no longer bound how intentional the movie’s different consequences are. The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, however the movie itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.

Eileen is released on 1 December in UK and Irish cinemas.