How does a film go wrong? The ways are many. But usually the screenplay and the director are to blame. In the case of the 1960 Massachusetts-set neo-noir “Eileen,” the actors also chew the scenery. The acclaimed actor Thomasin McKenzie of “The Power of the Dog” and “Last Night in Soho” plays the title role. Eileen Dunlop, 24, is the repressed daughter of retired Boston police chief Jim Dunlop (Shea Whigham). Jim is an angry alcoholic, whose daughter brings pint bottles of whiskey home for him every day. We also see Jim bring home a case of Stroh’s. Jim sits in front of the TV in his and Eileen’s dingy house in a wintry New England, drinking beer and whiskey, smoking cigarettes and handling his old service revolver. Sometimes, he wanders the streets of his neighborhood at night, armed and drunk and is brought home by a nice, young fellow cop.

Eileen drives a 1950s beater that smokes so badly when the engine runs that Eileen is forced to keep the widows open. This is only one of the film’s many ham-handed symbols. When she isn’t spying on couples in the local lovers’ lane and shoving snow down her pants, Eileen works at a nearby prison, where she is treated like she is mentally challenged and she meets the newest member of the staff: an attractive, platinum-haired, Harvard-educated psychologist named, of course, Rebecca (Academy Award-winner Anne Hathaway). You can see why the prison needs a therapist when the people in charge appear to think it’s OK to put on a Christmas show featuring a young, male prisoner in drag as the pregnant Virgin Mary. A riot breaks out. Eileen, who certainly needs a shrink, fantasizes about killing her father and herself. She has been showing an unhealthy interest in a troubled young inmate named Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), who is in the slammer for the murder of his, ahem, policeman father.

Rebecca, who drives a red convertible, for her part shows an interest in Eileen and even flirts with her. Eileen virtually plotzes. Rebecca invites Eileen for a drink after work. Eileen, who speaks in a thick Boston accent, guzzles her drinks and gets so drunk that she vomits inside her car, vomits outside her car, gets locked out of her house in the snow and loses a shoe. Eileen is a wreck in more ways than one.

Directed by London-born William Oldroyd, whose previous feature was the acclaimed, Florence Pugh-fronted period drama “Lady Macbeth” (2016), “Eileen” is based on the award-winning 2015 novel by Boston-born Ottessa Moshfegh adapted by Moshfegh and Luke Goebel (“Causeway”). “Eileen” will remind many of Todd Haynes’ 2015 effort “Carol,” a film based on a 1952 novel by Patricia Highsmith. Naturally, “Eileen” also has Hitchcockian qualities, including Hathaway’s ice-cold blonde femme fatale. Eileen even begins to dress like Rebecca and tries to take up smoking.

Oldroyd, who cut his teeth directing opera and theater, inserts ’60s-era pop songs such as the Exciters’ “Tell Him” before composer Richard Reed Parry goes all nervous, jazzy strings. Hathaway’s affected way of speaking causes her to swallow half her dialogue. Perhaps, it’s for the best.

(“Eileen” contains violent images, sexually-suggestive language and profanity)

“Eileen”

Rated R. At the Landmark Kendall Square. Grade: C