Director William Oldroyd’s piercingly good, wild-ride psychological thriller “Eileen” is not only set in 1964, but it feels as if it were MADE in that time period, with the production values, costumes, camerawork and even the acting choices made by the leads all feeling authentic to that period. It feels like we’re watching a Todd Haynes film as filtered through the lens of a Hitchcockian tale, with a late-story development that’s bat-bleep crazy but also gripping.
This is not to say Oldroyd, who helmed the Florence Pugh-starring “Lady Macbeth” (2016), doesn’t have a distinct style of his own. This is a well-crafted, tightly spun, finely honed piece of work. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s award-winning debut novel from 2015 of the same name (Moshfergh co-wrote the adaptation with Luke Goebel), “Eileen” features the New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie (“Jojo Rabbit,” “Last Night in Soho”), continuing to demonstrate her propensity for selecting terrific projects and her chameleon-like abilities to convincingly portray characters from various time periods and different corners of the world.
