Here’s a peculiar misfire of a psycho-noir, for which Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh have co-adapted Moshfegh’s Booker-shortlisted novel of the same name and William Oldroyd directs. It’s acted and presented with a weirdly solemn intensity, like a deadly serious remake of some lost John Waters pulp classic. Gif immortality beckons for the bizarre moment in which Anne Hathaway’s character grapples with what looks worryingly like a fake cat, throwing it out of the front door with a yowling noise on the soundtrack.
The setting is a small Massachusetts town in the early 60s, and Thomasin McKenzie plays Eileen, a mousy and repressed young woman working as a filing assistant at a juvenile prison. At home she is effectively the carer for her aggressively alcoholic widowed father Jim (Shea Whigham), an ex-cop who likes to get drunk, brandish his gun at the neighbours and humiliate Eileen. For her part, Eileen has repeated reveries of sex, vengeful violence and self-harm: bizarre micro-fantasies that are startling at first, but also verging on the clumsy and which undermine the impact of a real-world plot-twist to come.
