Eileen Is One Of The Best Movies Of The Year And You Should Avoid Learning Anything About It [Fantastic Fest]
Allow me to engage in some sausage-making, inside baseball nonsense: I’ve been working in the online film press since 2009 and have spent that entire time realizing that spoilers don’t bother me. As I have stumbled up the rungs of responsibility, eventually landing where I am now, as the lead (whether folks like it or not) of Slash Film Dot Com, spoilers have become a fact of life. I learn spoilers when I make phone calls to confirm or debunk stories. I learn spoilers when I work with my team to plan coverage for a new release. Learning the plot of a film, sometimes in great detail, before I see it has never hindered my enjoyment of a truly good movie. Spoilers don’t matter. In the grand scheme, plot (and, therefore, spoilers) is the least important part of a movie.
And today, I’m throwing my hands up in the air and temporarily tossing this philosophy out the window.
Director William Oldroyd’s “Eileen” is the rare film I’ve seen in the past decade where I didn’t know a single thing about the story before the lights in the theater dimmed. And it’s the rare film I’ve seen in the past decade where I exited the theater dreading the impending marketing campaign. Because distributors Neon and Focus Features are going to need to find a way to sell their new movie featuring rising star Thomasin McKenzie and established Oscar winner Anne Hathaway, a trailer is inevitable. They need this thing to make money so they can afford to take chances on future movies as good as “Eileen.” I won’t be mad when the trailer arrives with footage tipping its hand at what goes down in this film, but boy, I’ll definitely be a little bummed out.
Please let the first paragraph of this article do the heavy lifting when I say this: “Eileen” is among the best films hitting theaters in 2023, every movie fan with a shred of taste should watch it, and you should close your eyes and cover your ears whenever a trailer starts playing in your vicinity. Seeing this film knowing nothing — truly and absolutely nothing — was among my most thrilling moviegoing experiences of the past few years.
