Eileen can be difficult to categorize, but the team behind the new adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s lauded novel did their best. By the time she got to rehearsal, Anne Hathaway was still trying to figure the thing out. “As you can imagine, over the course of the past however many decades, I’ve read a number of scripts,” she tells me. “But I had to sit with this one. I had to go back to it. I had to walk away from it. It kept revealing itself to me.” Eileen felt new. 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. “But that helped!”

And 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. 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. One might assume that’s because Moshfegh produced and wrote the script herself, partnering on both counts with her husband, the writer Luke Goebel. 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. “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.”

Debut novels don’t often come as charmed as Eileen, a finalist for the Booker Prize that skyrocketed Moshfegh to literary fame. (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. 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. (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.

Hathaway first read the script, and in diving into the book thereafter, remembers getting to the moment Eileen starts to notice Rebecca’s façade crack. “If she seems insincere, she was,” Moshfegh writes. “I felt like that line set me free,” says Hathaway, who plays Rebecca in the movie. “The idea of playing someone who was delusional, but blind to their own delusions or how they come across—that’s when it got really, really juicy for me.”

Moshfegh had a simple reason for bringing her husband into the Eileen adaptation process: “I knew it would be better.” 

Speaking over Zoom next to Goebel, she explains that she needed another perspective to realize the story for the screen. “Having written the book, I have a very, very specific way that I’m looking at it, that I needed to approach it as the author,” she says. “I’m seeing Eileen from the inside out. Luke was able to say, ‘Well, I’m on the outside looking in.’” For instance, at one point, Moshfegh mentions Eileen is “both intensely secretive and private and yet also totally transparent.” Goebel turns to his wife: “Like you?” Moshfegh: “I’m not that—” Goebel: “You are not good at hiding at all.” Moshfegh: “Okay. All right. Guilty.” 

“These were 16-hour days, just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,” Goebel says of the experience of writing together. “‘Here’s a line.’ ‘No, what if it’s this?’ ‘Here’s a dialogue.’ ‘No, wait. He doesn’t say that. He says this.’ ‘Wait. What if he says this?’”

They got to work on the draft during the height of lockdown in 2020—and, as those who live on the West Coast surely remember, a particularly brutal season of wildfires. “We got chased by fires writing the screenplay, from Oregon to Pasadena to Palm Springs,” Moshfegh says. “There was a sense of looming danger haunting us, which actually really helped the writing process.” Indeed, Oldroyd’s film opens with the kind of foreboding, old-school title sequence that screams impending danger. Same goes for the surprising first scene that follows, which captures Eileen in a bizarre private moment. Moshfegh says, “We really wanted to experiment at the beginning with, ‘how far can we push it?’” Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry handles the score, and his hauntingly nostalgic theme kicks in from moment one, leaving you unsettled. 

That tends to go for Moshfegh’s writing generally. “Her writing makes you feel so uncomfortable,” Kiwi actress Thomasin McKenzie says with a giggle. McKenzie, who’d read My Year of Rest and Relaxation before encountering Eileen, won the eponymous part after submitting herself on tape, an audition Moshfegh says still gives her chills just thinking about. Best known for indies Jojo Rabbit and Leave No Trace, McKenzie’s work here is bold and uncompromising; she’s thoroughly dialed into the interior monologue of the original novel, replaced in the film by the brilliantly observant camera of cinematographer Ari Wegner (The Power of the Dog).

McKenzie compiled notes that wound up running more than 30 pages long, covering every line from Moshfegh that described how Eileen viewed herself, how she was viewed by others—“anything I could find out about her,” she says. McKenzie then sent this document to a prison psychologist in her native New Zealand, from whom she received a diagnosis for the character as well as insights into her loneliness, her mental health struggles, and her motivations for some of the more unusual choices she makes.

“Thomasin unseated me everyday with the depth of her talent,” Hathaway says. She and McKenzie got to know each other a bit before filming, establishing a dynamic which intriguingly mirrored the one we see in the movie. “I think one of my favorite films of all time is The Princess Diaries, so meeting Anne, I was pretty starstruck, to be honest,” McKenzie says. “That really worked in my favor. My personal perspective of Anne matched Eileen’s relationship with Rebecca”—McKenzie pauses a beat—“in a much less extreme and disturbed way.” She continues, “Eileen has no positive female influences in her life. That’s why she really latched on to Rebecca. It’s a chance at some connection.”

McKenzie remembers Hathaway taking her to an “incredible Indian restaurant” early on, and just listening to the star tell wild Hollywood stories. Even her hobbies were fascinating. “Anne mentioned that she’d read a book about mussels or some other sea creature that told the history of New York City,” McKenzie says. (Well, it may have been an oyster.) “I was like, ‘Wow, this is a very intelligent woman.’ Because who would read that? I’ve never met anyone else who reads a book like that.’”

Hathaway had a different kind of role to play here. She went out one weekend during production with a friend, and turned to him, concerned. “I said, ‘I think this time I’ve gone too far.’”

Hathaway calls the challenge of playing Rebecca one of “bringing main character energy to a supporting part—and having that translate.” This is a movie star performance in the purest sense, befitting the stylish fantasy that Rebecca projects. It’s big and beautiful and oh-so-mysterious. “I [remember] just throwing everything at it and it feeling very risky,” Hathaway says. “I did hold my breath until I finally saw the film and saw that Will understood what I was doing—because it was very big. There was a much safer route to go with her.” 

It’s right in line with Oldroyd’s perspective, a playful and heightened take on tropes and conventions of the era—and particularly, of its cinema. Hathaway’s midcentury glamour is very much part of that. So too are Wegner’s visuals: The Oscar nominee joined her Lady Macbeth partner Oldroyd at the actual locations of Eileen, from the authentic house they scouted for Eileen and her father (Shea Whigham) to the prison they had built in composites, prior to filming. Oldroyd would act out scenes himself, swapping on different coats and hats, and Wegner photographed him “acting it all out,” he recalls. They’d figure out the blocking and the lenses in that process, including their signature camera move. “One trick that movies of the ’60s used very successfully is the zoom lens,” Oldroyd says. “We wanted to sparingly capture Eileen’s realizations using a slow zoom. We wanted this to have the nostalgic qualities of movies of the ’60s, whilst at the same time feeling like some of the behavior was very contemporary and fresh.”

Since Oldroyd had been involved with Moshfegh and Goebel before a draft was even written, they got to know each other well. They plan to continue doing so, now at work on another project, which none of the trio will tell me much about, except for Oldroyd teasing it’s “another dark love story.” They have yet another idea they may jump into next; they’re going to sit down together at Sundance, where Eileen premieres this weekend, and talk all about it. Moshfegh and Goebel have four screen projects total in the works, and Moshfegh remains committed to her fiction career as well. “I just continue to be an insane maniac and take on way too much and don’t get enough sleep,” she says.

This is one movie where nobody except Oldroyd, it’s safe to say, knew exactly where it was going. The set could feel weird. Was everything working? Could it come together? For Moshfegh and Goebel, especially, a lot is riding on this first big swing for the screen. “I find it to be a film that makes me kind of feel like, okay, there might be a future,” Moshfegh says. “There’s a place for us. We’re not wasting our time.” Or take it from a Hollywood veteran like Hathaway, who went from complete uncertainty to, as we speak just days before the Park City premiere, great pride in Eileen: “It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever been in. Even if I wasn’t in it, it’d be one of my favorite things I’ve seen in ages.”