Courtesy of Sundance
Eileen’s first image is through a car windshield as the vehicle’s interior fills with smoke. Consider that haze a multifaceted metaphor—for pent-up desire, lethal suffocation, and liberating concealment—as well as a potential case of the Chekhov’s gun principle.
That said, a real firearm also plays a part in William Oldroyd’s adaptation of Otessa Moshfegh’s book of the same name, which premiered Friday at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The film interweaves elements from his prior Lady Macbeth, Todd Haynes’ Carol, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho and various 1940s noirs and 1950s melodramas into something sultry, sinister, and—thanks to a neck-snapping late twist—wholly surprising.
In snowy 1960s Boston at Christmas, 24-year-old Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) works at a prison for boys, where her primary duties are patting down the women who come to visit their sons and suffering the withering scorn of her boss (Siobhan Fallon Hogan). Eileen has a stern, placid countenance but eyes that are far from dull. As she moves through the hallways of her place of employment, her gaze is keen, critical and—when it comes to a handsome guard as well as a particular inmate whom she watches in the yard—covetous.