Making her mark

Kiwi actress Thomasin McKenzie returns to the festival where she first made the cinema world sit up and take notice.

- MICHELE MANELIS

Five years ago, a teenage Thomasin McKenzie arrived at the Sundance Film Festival with Leave No Trace. This was the father-daughter survivalist story that marked her first starring role in a feature. She returned to the influential American movie industry event late last month where it seems the career tailwind she first gained in 2018 has yet to subside.

The Leave No Trace performance won McKenzie acclaim and award nominations, and connected her with the Hollywood agents and managers that have helped shape her career since.

Even with a pandemic, the now 22-year-old has racked up nine more features and Life After Life, last year’s BBC drama adaptation of the Kate Atkinson book.

Her latest, and the reason for her Sundance return, is Eileen, the film of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel set in 1960s New England. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016.

McKenzie is the titular character, a seemingly timid and mousy clerk in a boys’ prison. Lonely, depressed and eager to escape her dead-end town and abusive alcoholic father, Eileen’s life changes with the arrival of Rebecca St John (Anne Hathaway), the glamorous Harvard-trained new psychologist at the institution. Their friendship takes Eileen down a dark and twisting path – McKenzie may have played some wide-eyed innocents or wise-beyond-her-years characters in her early roles, but the unhinged Eileen is a definite departure from both.

Early reviews have noted echoes of Carol, the 2015 film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara about a forbidden 1950s love affair, but with touches of Hitchcock.