Eileen’s handsome, charming big brother Michael took everything from her: her passion for horses and music, the love of their parents, her childhood innocence - and her womanhood. He raped her not just physically but emotionally, sentencing her to a lonely life in their sleepy Irish village.
When Michael leaves to go travelling, eventually settling down to raise a family in Australia, Eileen stays behind to work in the family shop - and never leaves, caring for her elderly parents until they die.
Now aged 64, she is alone in the decaying house attached to the derelict shop, tormented with nightmares, ruminating on her regrets (including a lesbian romance nipped in the bud) and poring over social media images of Michael’s perfect family.
One day she gets an email from Michael to announce he’s coming home. He has big plans for the old premises and family home, which he intends to run as a boutique hotel with his grown-up children.
Trapped by a clause in her mother’s will giving her a “right of residence until death” in the family home, Eileen realises that she is nothing but a “placeholder” for the next generation.
When Michael arrives at the airport Eileen realises he’s very frail - and it soon becomes clear that he also expects her to be his carer.
But Eileen is done caring. Decades of repressed rage surge to the surface and she takes revenge on her brother with the help of some rat poison.
Meanwhile Michael’s daughter Aisling is worried as she hasn’t from her father and can’t get in touch with her aunt. Having heard that Eileen was stern and unwelcoming, she dreads meeting her, and is secretly grateful when first her connecting fight is delayed and then her rental car breaks down on an Irish country road.
After a night in a hotel, Aisling finally arrives at the old family home where a grisly scene awaits: the maggot-infested corpses of her father and aunt are involuntarily re-enacting the sordid scenes from their youth.
Watching over the terrified young woman with is the ghost of Eileen. In her niece, Eileen sees the person she could have been.
The film ends with Eileen as a young woman on horseback, galloping across the Connemara countryside, to the tune of Christy Moore’s Ride On.
THE SHOPKEEPER’S GIRL is a haunting, lyrical film about intergenerational trauma, forgotten women and the irrepressible will to survive.