“Love will make you crazy,” Eileen’s bitter alcoholic father tells he,r midway through William Oldroyd’s erotic death plunge to freedom (adapted by Ottessa Moshfegh from her Booker-nominated novel). Hell, don’t we know it. To hammer home the withering disdain in which he holds his daughter’s perceived non-life, Pops adds a devastating: “But you will never know that.” Little is he aware of the insane desire already flipping her lid.
Not the finest parenting technique, but dad has a point. Trapped in a desolately dull, late-Sixties Massachusetts town (albeit bathed in an ominous blanket of winter mist, for this is a noir after all), Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) is the drabbest of them all. Her days working a dead-end admin job at the local young offenders institution are followed by a nightly soul-crushing from her father. But… we’ve already seen Eileen with her hands, and stranger things, down her pants, pleasuring herself. A clear sign this mousey nobody might well roar.
