By Peter Keough

Like the novel it is based on, Eileen eventually becomes a morally ambiguous, and twisted, noirish mystery.

Eileen, directed by William Oldroyd. At the Landmark Kendall Square and at the AMC Boston Common 19.

Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway in a scene from Eileen. Photo: Neon

With the exception of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), a Boston accent has ruined almost every film that has dared to indulge in it. Or maybe that’s only for those from around here. The Academy doesn’t seem to mind — among the most egregious examples are Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting (1997) and Tim Robbins in Mystic River (2003), and they both won Oscars.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but wince at its jarring appearance in William Oldroyd’s adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2015 novel Eileen. There’s no hint of any accent in the novel’s first person narration: it is disconcerting to hear the title character dropping r’s and broadening a’s (she’s played by a disarmingly elfin Thomasin McKenzie, who, though from New Zealand, has better luck with the accent than Williams or Robbins). The change adds little to the characterization. Especially given that the story is so reliant on Eileen’s inner life, on her unreliable point-of-view, and on her voice, which is so beguiling, if repugnant. Details of period or setting recede into a solipsistic miasma.

That story takes place in 1964 during the dark and cheerless week before Christmas in a North Shore town so lacking in distinction that Eileen calls it “X-ville.” She is a self-loathing, body-dysmorphic, 24-year-old woman who works as a clerk at Moorhead, a grotesque juvenile prison. Her mother is dead and her father Jim, an abusive, moribund alcoholic, had been the town’s police chief. Now he is retired and, when he’s not berating Eileen, terrorizes the neighborhood by wandering the streets waving his gun to drive away imaginary “hoodlums.”

Because of his connections, the cops give Jim a pass on these antics and leave it to Eileen to keep him under control, which she manages by hiding all his shoes in the trunk of her battered Dodge Coronet. But, played with colorless inertia by Shea Whigham, Jim doesn’t make much of an impression in the film, thus squelching the book’s most suffocating and essential relationship. Instead, the focus falls on Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), the head-turning, hottie psychiatrist who arrives at Moorehead to apply progressive therapeutic methods. Given the institution’s policies of sadistic corporal punishment for such infractions as masturbation and snarky comments, it’s a tough assignment.

But Eileen is instantly smitten by Rebecca’s beauty, style, and studied glibness. At this point the film turns into a kind of hard-boiled version of Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015), with possible hints of some Dennis Lehane novel as adapted by Ben Affleck. Rebecca not only seduces Eileen, but steals the movie, maybe because she is the only character not trying to talk like a townie. (Hathaway says she picked up her character’s plummy patrician accent by studying a Patricia Neal Maxim instant coffee commercial).

When Rebecca invites Eileen to have a drink after work she is overwhelmed. So are the yokels at the bar when the two dance to the music on the jukebox. They are even more impressed when Rebecca coldcocks a creep trying to cut in. After Rebecca kisses Eileen and leaves, the emboldened young woman returns to the bar and orders another drink. She wakes up in her car the next morning, her face pillowed by her frozen vomit, with no recollection of what happened.

Rebecca, meanwhile, seems to have more important business to tend to at Moorehead besides wooing Eileen. She has taken an interest in the case of Lee, a teenage inmate who murdered his father — a cop like Jim — by cutting his throat with a kitchen knife while he was asleep. Rebecca wonders what could have driven someone to such a heinous deed (she rejects Eileen’s suggestion that everyone wants to murder their father). And so, like the book, the film then descends into twisted noirish mystery and a quagmire of moral ambiguity.

Moshfegh and her husband Luke Goebel wrote the screenplay. The book’s scatology and the details about bodily functions have been toned down, but the pair have retained enough of them to generate some of the film’s more queasily funny moments. Such as when Eileen daydreams about being ravished by a hunky guard at work, discreetly masturbates, then sniffs her finger. Otherwise, fantasy sequences such as these add little to dramatizing Eileen’s inner life, certainly compared to what had been so vividly achieved on the page.

But some of their choices improve on the original material. Like changing Lee’s mother from a gross, obese caricature to a more nuanced and far more disturbing character. Played by Marin Ireland, she delivers a monologue more potent in its quiet denunciation of the crimes of the patriarchy and the oppression of women than the highly touted speech in Barbie. Its mounting horror and outrage will harrow your soul. And the accent is perfect.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).