For those of us who never quite bought into the idea that Love Actually is “honestly such a great movie!!”, William Oldroyd’s adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker-shortlisted debut should be a welcome respite from the usual deluge of Hallmark schmaltz this December.
While the author’s cult novel My Year Of Rest And Relaxation takes place on the Upper East Side in 2000, a time of “stupid knock-off Kate Spade bag[s]” and appallingly bad YBA-inspired art, Eileen is set during a frigid Massachusetts winter in 1964, when its titular heroine’s routine – shoplifting from local stores in her hometown of X-ville, stockpiling gin for her alcoholic father, working as a secretary in a correctional facility for “troubled youths” – is interrupted in the run up to the holidays by the arrival of Rebecca, a redheaded femme fatale/counsellor with a decidedly peculiar interest in a young male prisoner convicted of murdering his own father. Seasons tidings.
Anne Hathaway, in an unusually cool career move, will star as Rebecca – whose name is, of course, a nod to Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic noir – while The Power of the Dog’s Thomasin McKenzie will twist herself into knots of self-loathing as Eileen, and Shea Whigham, whose turn in the Perry Mason reboot deserved more accolades, will embody Eileen’s charmer of a father. As for the script? Moshfegh wrote it with her partner, fellow novelist Luke Goebel.
Take the first trailer, which dropped on 17 October, as your cue to order a copy of the book; Oldroyd is brilliant (effectively launching Florence Pugh’s career with his 2016 adaptation of the 19th-century Russian novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), but Eileen’s descriptions of her vermouth- and laxative-fuelled existence demand to be read, to say nothing of her neologisms: “A grown woman is like a coyote – she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they’ll die of sadness.” Put that on a stocking, why don’t you?
