Thomasin McKenzie is an actress who gets better and better with each new film. William Oldroyd’s “Eileen” continues her streak of great performances, as the always interesting young actress gets one of her meatiest roles yet.

McKenzie plays the reserved title character who leaves college and comes home to 1960’s Boston to care for her father (Shea Whigham), a retired cop full of anger and bitterness and a vicious drunk who verbally abuses his daughter. Wingham has become the go-to for rough-edged grumps, but the actor is always good (extremely good), injecting his performances with a rare emotional intensity that most of today’s actors fail to reach. With his great work in this film and Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” (both darlings at this year’s Sundance) and on the excellent series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves’, 2023 is a fruitful time for Wingham.

Eileen has taken a job at the Moorehead Prison for Boys, where she meets a new hire brought on as the head of education, Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway). The sexually frustrated Eileen is immediately attracted to her. Rebecca is everything Eileen longs to be, as her alluring new co-worker is open-minded, outspoken, and alive with personality. Rebecca is far removed from anyone Hathaway has played to date. The character seems sultry and fun on the outside, but there is something darker within, a spark which Eileen latches onto, her own dark thoughts running through her veins.

Anne Hathaway navigates the role quite well and loses some of the more annoying acting ticks that have sunk her performances in so many films. Quite often, the actress is obvious in her work thus far. While she was terrific in Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel at the Wedding”, most of the time, we can see her working things out on screen. As Rebecca, the actress is unrestrained, focused, and digs deeper than she ever has, resulting in the performance of her career.

Eileen and Rebecca’s scenes together have a fire to them. McKenzie shows skillful restraint in her acting choices while pulling off Eileen’s barely suppressed sexual urges and dangerous inclinations. When these two actresses trade dialogue, the picture is an intense and subtly erotic pleasure. It is a shame that Oldroyd’s film fails to reach the high bar set by the performances from his two leads.

Adapted by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh (from Moshfegh’s novel), the film wants to be (to use an already overused phrase) Hitchcockian in its examinations of two dangerous women coming together and the twisted outcome their pairing ignites. Oldroyd’s direction is nothing but a put on. The filmmaker can’t hold his grip on the screenplay’s drama nor does it maintain the required suspense, which should have really popped for this story. The director’s bag of tricks seems to be empty. The whole exercise is sadly undercooked, as the intricacies found within the novel and its characters are only hinted at. It is up to McKenzie and Hathaway to find the layers to Eileen and Rebecca (and they do!), but the duo is failed by their director’s alienating filmmaking. Oldroyd makes a few strange decisions throughout, the most dramatically offensive is ending his film too abruptly when there was so much more to explore. The final shot wants to be taken as a macabre joke and the joke is certainly on us, but not the way the filmmaker intended.