Thomasin McKenzie co-stars in this ice-cold noir in which two mysterious women let their lust draw them towards disturbing fates

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William Oldroyd’s debut, 2016’s Lady Macbeth, cannon-shot Florence Pugh towards stardom. A taut, economical period drama, it practically curled itself up at the actor’s feet, happy to warm itself by the fire that burnt in her eyes. Oldroyd’s follow-up, the Sixties-set thriller Eileen, could, at a glance, offer the same to its lead Thomasin McKenzie. But she’s already shown us her knack for this kind of electrically-repressed woman, the mouse with a roar in her stomach, in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. Instead, the thrill of Eileen lies in how McKenzie plays off the film’s inciting spark, a blonde-bobbed enigma played by Anne Hathaway.

McKenzie’s Eileen is the younger, unloved daughter of an alcoholic ex-cop (Shea Whigham). She works at the local prison, outside Boston, patting down visiting daughters, mothers and wives while she daydreams about young officers slamming her up against the wall for a quick feel. At home, her father cusses out those who were born only to take up space. “That’s you, Eileen”, he makes sure to add. His old gun is still in the house. She could kill him. Or, perhaps, she could kill herself. Eileen’s boredom teeters on a deadly precipice.

Hathaway’s Rebecca is the prison’s new psychologist, fresh from Harvard. She warms to Eileen, and invites her out for a drink. If their dynamic is in any way reminiscent of Todd Haynes’s lesbian romance Carol – the brunette naïf and the older, elegant confidante – Oldroyd makes sure to knock the comparison into an uncanny slant. Eileen is no innocent. McKenzie, in each illicit smile, initiates us into a galaxy of uncouth thoughts, ignited by Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), the young man jailed for murdering his law enforcement father, and the way Rebecca so openly spurns male attention to be, talk, and dance with her.

What, here, is love? And what is desire, jealousy, or merely a search for permission? In Carol, Cate Blanchett’s elegant sophisticate refers to Rooney Mara’s Therese as a “strange girl… flung out of space”. Here, Eileen is to Rebecca “a girl in a Dutch painting – plain, but fascinating.” Hathaway doesn’t exude warmth, but something at a more wry, but equally seductive, remove. With her head thrown back, and a cigarette dangling from her hand, she looks at Eileen like she might otherwise regard one of her patients, with a curious desire to take a hammer to her defences.

Oldroyd is working off a script by Ottessa Moshfegh and her partner, Luke Goebel, which serves as an adaptation of Moshfegh’s 2015 novel of the same name. It was the author’s attempt to deliver her own iteration of “the airport novel” and, so, Eileen and Rebecca are ushered towards shocking, unexpected fates.

But Eileen is also thick with odd, oppressive irony. Eileen grabs a fistful of snow and sticks it down her pants, after a couple lock into an embrace in the car next to hers. A doctor with a Christmas hat, sitting lopsided on his head, delivers bad news. A young woman saunters around, dressed up in her dead mother’s clothes. Soon, all the old markers of seduction – lingering glances, fingers brushing up against flesh – start to curdle, to the point that Moshfegh’s twists start to feel more like inevitabilities. Eileen is full of dark secrets and darker desires. They need only the mere whisper of affirmation to rear their head.

Dir: William Oldroyd. Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, Sam Nivola, Owen Teague. 15, 98 minutes.

‘Eileen’ is in cinemas from 1 December