Ottessa Moshfegh—an author people tend to absolutely love or absolutely loathe—has her first big-screen adaptation in William Oldroyd’s Eileen, a tale of parasitic obsession between a young and introverted prison secretary (Thomasin McKenzie) and the striking and mysterious psychologist (Anne Hathaway) that comes into her place of work and turns her life upside down.
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The trailer doesn’t really reveal much of the actual story beyond the above description, but if Moshfegh’s other work is anything to go by, this is sure to be a perverse, sinful, destabilizing, and delicious journey all in one.
Hathaway—whose character Rebecca is named after the Alfred Hitchcock film, which marks a clear influence here—certainly looks the part of a 1960s-era femme fatale. (The film is specifically set “during a bitter 1964 Massachusetts winter,” per the official synopsis.) Entering Eileen’s life in a cherry-red car and bleach-blonde updo, she consistently throws out lines like “I live a little differently than most people” and “people are so ashamed of their desires... I have my own ideas.” By the end of the short clip, she’s screaming manically.
We learn that Rebecca is hiding some sort of dark secret, one that she confides in her young protégé, presumably corrupting her irrevocably. At least, Eileen is wearing red lipstick, having sex in prison, and cocking a gun by the trailer’s end.
Director William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) actually debuted the film back at Sundance earlier this year, but it seems like the less you know going in the better. “As you can imagine, over the course of the past however many decades, I’ve read a number of scripts,” Anne Hathaway said of the film in a January interview, hailing it as “one of my favorite things I’ve ever been in.” “I had to sit with this one,” she continued. “I had to go back to it. I had to walk away from it. It kept revealing itself to me.”
Eileen will open in a limited number of theaters December 1, before expanding to a wider release December 8.