Some movies are safe. Eileen is a dare.

polygon.com:

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.

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Based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, who co-wrote the script with Luke Goebel (also her writing partner on the 2022 Jennifer Lawrence movie Causeway), Eileen takes place in 1960s Boston, where Eileen Dunlop (Old and The Power of the Dog’s Thomasin McKenzie) works as a clerk for a local prison. There, she meets new counselor Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a glamorous cosmopolitan vision of a woman. Eileen is immediately smitten. As their relationship deepens, both women enable each other’s worst impulses, until they’re in deep over their heads.

Oldroyd, known for 2016’s arresting period piece Lady Macbeth, keeps the camera as tight as Eileen’s script. His solution for adapting a first-person novel that hinges on a character’s interiority is to make that interiority the central mystery of the film. Eileen’s cast is small, and everyone in it