When Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen was first released in 2015, she found herself having a lot of conversations about her “disgusting” title character—a young woman who works in a boys’ prison in 1964 Massachusetts, and whose bodily functions and habits are described in vivid, sometimes odorous detail.
“I felt sort of misunderstood a lot of the time because Eileen was never actually disgusting,” Moshfegh says on a recent Zoom call. “She felt disgusting. She was describing feelings about herself, and everybody else sort of wanted to focus on just how nasty she actually was.”
With the new film version of the sordid story, cowritten by Moshfegh and her partner, Luke Goebel, Moshfegh has the chance to correct the record—in part because of the actress playing her undervalued heroine, Thomasin McKenzie. “Thomasin might be the least disgusting person I’ve ever met,” Moshfegh says. “Absolutely gorgeous and angelic, almost. And I think that in itself changes the way that we see Eileen.”
Eileen, out December 1 in limited release in the US, is the first of Moshfegh’s novels to make it to the big screen. The film, directed by William Oldroyd of Lady Macbeth, stars McKenzie as the lowly and lonely figure, who lives with an abusive drunk of a father (Shea Whigham) and falls under the spell of the new psychiatrist at her work, Rebecca Saint John, alluringly played by Anne Hathaway in a blonde wig. As Eileen gets closer to Rebecca, she realizes that the older, more glamorous woman’s friendship comes with a contingency—one that is revealed in a shocking climax.
Moshfegh, a literary celebrity whose 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation is ubiquitous on the laps of hip readers in the New York City subway, has been dipping her toes into the waters of Hollywood. She and Goebel were hired to work on the screenplay for last year’s Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence—but with Eileen, she could truly see the filmmaking process up close.
Though Oldroyd had been given a copy of her 2020 novel, Death in Her Hands, about a widow who falls down an investigatory rabbit hole after finding a strange note, Moshfegh says their initial conversation immediately turned to Eileen. “He was the first and only person to say, ‘I’m passionate about this character and I see her for exactly who she is,’” she remembers.
There was always a cinematic conceit to Eileen. The novel is narrated by an older version of the protagonist, someone who loves noir and mimics that genre in the way she tells her story. Onscreen, you can see how those homages become literal from the very first title card, which evokes color noir, like 1953’s Niagara.
Moshfegh has found it more challenging to adapt some of her other works—the still-in-progress My Year of Rest and Relaxation “needs to be rewired,” she said. She also used that phrase to describe developing a version of McGlue, a murder mystery novella about a drunken sailor, with All of Us Strangers director Andrew Haigh. That was not the case as she and Goebel tackled Eileen alongside Oldroyd. “There was a sort of shared pure intention and respect for the character and for the project that it never felt like a strain,” she says. “Just this really exciting rediscovery of the character.”