IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that the driving force in William Oldroyd’s psychological thriller Eileen is named… Rebecca. Adapted from her own novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, it’s set in 1964 Boston, as downtrodden, wide-eyed prison secretary Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) meets glamorous, no-bullshit new counsellor Rebecca (Anne Hathaway). Moshfegh’s book was inspired by Hitchcock’s take on Daphne du Maurier’s classic, and Oldroyd duly follows through — to the nth degree.
“It’s funny, because a few years ago I got a script through, a remake of Rebecca,” the Lady Macbeth director says. “But would you ever go near it? Would you ever want to remake a Hitchcock?” Well, Ben Wheatley went there. But horses for courses. “With Eileen,” says Oldroyd, “I thought there was an opportunity to make an original story in the spirit of Hitchcock.” He did so on practically every level, with playful self-awareness and attention to detail. “We drew a lot of stuff from the early ’70s,” he says. “I’m a big Alan J. Pakula fan, and Ari [Wegner, cinematographer] is a huge Gordon Willis fan. We actually took lenses from the ’60s. They’re really scratched and battered, but we love the imperfections in the glass.”
The movie leans heavily into the filmmaking style of the era, with cannily deployed zooms, a killer freeze frame at the end, and a consciously melodramatic score. Eileen never, though, feels stuck in the past, because of the material itself. “I needed the attitude to feel contemporary, because Eileen and Rebecca are out of time,” explains Oldroyd. Indeed, the men are stunned by Rebecca, who scoffs at cultural norms, and turns Eileen’s life upside down. “She’s as rare to those men in that prison as she is to Eileen, who’s never ever encountered anybody like this in her life,” says Oldroyd. “It’s like an alien lands.”