Some movies are safe. Eileen is a dare.
Sometimes a film doesn’t feel like a dialogue between audience and artist so much as it feels like a grand game. A dare, perhaps, with a filmmaker challenging viewers to pin down what kind of story they’re watching before they reach the end. William Oldroyd’s taut thriller Eileen feels like that kind of film: a dodgy psychological drama of small twitches and barely contained passions, furtively placing one foot on the ground, then asking you to guess where the next will go.