That tends to go for Moshfegh’s writing generally. (Moshfegh has said she named her after the iconic Hitchcock thriller.) As an older Eileen narrates, “She was my ticket to a new life.” They chat, they drink, they gossip-until a Christmas Day gathering upends everything. Eileen’s loneliness, her desire to escape her drunken father and her small town, finds a seeming cure in the arrival of Rebecca, an unspeakably glamorous psychologist who begins working at the prison. (Her next book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, was a New York Times bestseller and critical favorite.) Its singularity emerged most potently, tinging the story of a young secretary at a New England juvenile facility with elements of noir and the grotesque. “I just wrote down what emerged as a rough beat sheet, if you like, and I shared that with them-and they just set about writing the draft.”ĭebut novels don’t often come as charmed as Eileen, a finalist for the Booker Prize that skyrocketed Moshfegh to literary fame. But Oldroyd, best known for helming 2016’s Lady Macbeth, came into the project early with a similarly clean vision out of the novel: “As I read it and reread it in lockdown, images came to mind, scenes that I could see very clearly play out on screen,” he says. One might assume that’s because Moshfegh produced and wrote the script herself, partnering on both counts with her husband, the writer Luke Goebel. Eileen stays mostly faithful to the book on which it’s based, save the kinds of cuts any feature would need to make and the occasional narrative detour.

“But that helped!”Īnd there is some truth to it: William Oldroyd’s ’60s drama announces itself with striking period style as it examines an intense new connection between two adrift women-only for their bond to take a terrible, bloody turn in the final act. So the Oscar winner and her collaborators settled on the most concise description of what they were doing, exactly, to help guide them: “ Carol meets Reservoir Dogs.” Hathaway laughs as she says it out loud now. It kept revealing itself to me.” Eileen felt new. “As you can imagine, over the course of the past however many decades, I’ve read a number of scripts,” she tells me. By the time she got to rehearsal, Anne Hathaway was still trying to figure the thing out.

Eileen can be difficult to categorize, but the team behind the new adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s lauded novel did their best.

Book eileen by ottessa moshfegh