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There are few topics as compelling as obsession between women. Whether the obsession is lustful, competitive, or self-effacing, this instinct has long fascinated filmmakers, particularly within the modes of melodrama and noir. Two recent films take obsession as one of their main focal points, but with markedly different tones and styles. Both films also garnered the excitement of lesbian and queer viewers when they were first announced, though neither are quite what we expected.

Todd Haynes’ May December is a film about filmmaking, but not in a backstage musical kind of way. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, a TV actress doing research for her next project. She travels to Savannah, Georgia to observe Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), the subjects of her upcoming film. Gracie and Joe became tabloid fodder twenty years earlier when Gracie began a relationship with Joe when he was just 12 years old. Though Gracie went to prison as a result of the “affair,” she and Joe are now married with three kids. 

Elizabeth spends the film studying Gracie, trying to parse out her motivations and get a handle on her mannerisms. She adopts Gracie’s distinctive lisp and begins dressing like her. Haynes’ most obvious inspiration for the film is Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in which an actress suffering from a breakdown begins an odd, symbiotic relationship with her nurse. May December’s frequent use of mirror shots recalls the instances in Persona in which the two women, both centered in the frame, begin to become one another. Elizabeth and Gracie look at another in every mirror shot, observing themselves – or a version of themselves – in the other. 

Despite the film’s penchant for detached camera work a la Bergman, it also alludes to melodrama, especially through its use of audio cues. The film’s score – a re-imagining of Michel Legrand’s score for The Go-Between – swells dramatically at unexpected moments, finding humor in an otherwise tense story. Indeed, the film is something of a dark comedy, though the “jokes,” if you can call them that, never reveal a punchline. Haynes also drew from Sunset Boulevard, another dark comedy that uses melodrama to tell a story in the style of noir.

Haynes doesn’t see the film as camp, though some have described it that way. Instead, he describes these funny, over-the-top sequences – like the hilarious hot dog line at the beginning – as “moments of excess.” These are “little ruptures in what is mostly a naturalistically performed movie,” reminding us how extreme these two women are. 

These dichotomies are what make the film so effective, and its ultimate meaning so ambiguous. Set in May in Georgia, the film’s warm, soft palette disguises its unsettling core. Some moments elicit laughter, while others induce shivers. The truth that Elizabeth is so desperate to discover proves elusive, though she must ultimately settle on a version of Gracie to embody. Elizabeth wants to metabolize Gracie’s essence, but what she ends up with is merely a vulgar simulacrum of a hollow woman. 

In William Oldroyd’s Eileen, the truth is just as slippery. Based on the Ottessa Moshfegh novel of the same name, the film follows our titular character (Thomasin McKenzie), a young woman who works at a boys' prison in 1960s Massachusetts. No one at work likes her, and her home life is even worse. She lives with her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), a former police chief who does nothing but hurl abuses at her. Her mundane existence is interrupted by the arrival of Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), the new prison psychologist. Rebecca’s glamorous appearance and fearless attitude enchant Eileen, and the two women strike up a friendship. A third-act twist takes the film in an entirely new direction, as Rebecca and Eileen reveal themselves for who they really are. 

When images for Eileen were first released, sapphics immediately made comparisons to Carol, one of Todd Haynes’ most beloved films (certainly by readers of this newsletter). The mid-century time period, a blonde starring opposite a younger brunette, and the December setting – all striking similarities. Hathaway describes the film as “Carol meets Reservoir Dogs,” noting the former film’s slow-burning love story and the latter’s surprising twist. 

While Carol dips into noir at the end of the second act, Eileen maintains a noir sensibility throughout, and the gloomy atmosphere rarely lifts. The most obvious cinematic parallel is the work of Hitchcock, whose fascination with sexual obsession and perversity helped define the genre. Moshfegh shared that one of her primary influences for the book was Hitchcock’s Rebecca, who Moshfegh describes as an “untouchable beautiful woman who seemed to be this way and then turned out to be that way.” In Eileen, our main character inhabits both the naivete of Mrs. De Winter and the destructive queer devotion of Mrs. Danvers. Eileen’s Rebecca is a ghostly figure as well, invoking the memory of Eileen’s dearly departed mother.

Eileen wants to consume Rebecca, though it’s not clear whether she wants to be like her or become her as in Persona. At the end of their scene together in the bar, Eileen asks the bartender for a lighter so she can smoke the end of Rebecca’s abandoned cigarette. Eileen will do anything to be closer to Rebecca – to smell her, to taste her. Eileen also has a sweet tooth, and we see her – rather grossly, it should be noted – chewing candy in bed to satisfy her desires. Hunger drives Eileen, and this perversity repels those around her. 

Tonally, May December and Eileen are opposites. While May December’s dark underbelly is encased in warmth and even humor, Eileen wears morbidity on its frigid sleeve. Both films express the kind of dangerous obsession associated with queer desire, though with very different aims. But where one succeeds in bringing the audience along for the ride, the other falls flat. 

May December entertains the audience just as much as it unsettles us. We are told to laugh, and then shocked into silence. The movie questions the notion that films can ever get at any sort of objective truth of a story, implicating both the medium and the audience in this inquiry. This is a very meta enterprise, but the performances – especially from Charles Melton, who gives the film all of its pathos – tether May December to a sense of humanity rather than pure artifice. 

Eileen, on the other hand, rarely lets go of its coldness, and there is little in the way of poignancy or revelation. We learn about human depravity and the crushing weight of loneliness, but this throughline is hazy and unfocused. Despite Hathaway’s delicious performance, the film never coalesces into something solid, and though there are plenty of moments meant to startle us, the climax is something of a letdown. To shock is not the same as to invigorate, and Eileen fails at provoking the latter. In this case, the transition from spring to winter is a mournful one. 

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