Ottessa Moshfegh and Anne Hathaway on Blowing Up the Good Girl ...

Few writers understand the plight of disaffected young women in America like Ottessa Moshfegh. There are no saints or perfect love stories in the worlds she designs, but her characters’ unabashed displays of neuroticism have made her iconic in a way that transcends mere literary fame. Scroll through social media long enough, and you’re bound to spot the cover image from My Year of Rest and Relaxation– Moshfegh’s 2018 novel about a beautiful yet horrifically depressed twentysomething—on pastel-pink mood board collages alongside Lana Del Rey lyrics, white bows, suicidal musings, and the occasional Glossier product.

Although she occasionally interacts with readers through her Depop store, Moshfegh herself is mostly offline these days, and says she finds the impulse to package one’s personality and girlhood a little creepy, although she understands why it happens: “It's much easier, when we’re younger, to point to something that exists than to have to say, ‘Here I am, and let me describe it to you all from the beginning.’”

Before the nameless narrator of Rest and Relaxation turned Moshfegh into the patron saint of self-identified sad girls, femcels, girl perverts, coquettes, and unhinged women in their villain eras, there was Eileen Dunlop—the equally sardonic title character of Moshfegh’s debut novel. A 24-year-old prison secretary with a God complex to match her self-loathing, Eileen would be pleased to know that she’s the first of Moshfegh’s literary heroines to make it to the big screen. (OttessaHive, do not fret: Moshfegh promises that the My Year of Rest and Relaxation movie is still chugging along, too.)

Like the book, the film takes place in 1964, in an unnamed town in Massachusetts. It’s the holidays and Eileen is lonely, involuntarily a virgin, and miserable in the cramped home she shares with her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham.) Then an enigmatic therapist, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), joins the prison staff, and Eileen realizes that her life as she knows it is over. As the two women attempt to correct a tragic injustice, Eileen becomes a story about fate and individual agency duking it out. “What I find so interesting is how we design our lives, knowing that we have unlimited power to do so,” Moshfegh says. “I think that might also be why I write about characters in isolation, and also characters who are incarcerated.”

Moshfegh , alongside her husband and co-writer Luke Goebel, did not intend the screenplay as a strict adaptation. Characters are combined, events are reinterpreted, and Film Eileen is noticeably tamer than Book Eileen. There aren’t any scenes showcasing her laxative obsession, stalking her crush at his house, or shaking hands with coworkers after masturbating. These choices, Moshfegh said, had more to do with the time constraints of visual storytelling than they did with making Eileen digestible to a broader audience. “I was never like, ‘Oh, no, we can't include that because people won't like her,” Moshfegh tells GQ. “It was more like, ‘What few things do I need to push for, so that we have this really dimensional understanding of the character?’”

Even without first-person narration, much of the same vein of wry intimacy and gallows humor runs through the film. Thomasin McKenzie communicates Eileen’s rich inner life with just her face. She skitters around the prison like an office mouse and gawks with such awkward curiosity that you’ll feel possessed by your mother’s spirit to scream “Stop staring, Eileen!” At one point during shooting, McKenzie slipped on the front stairs of the Dunlop home. That take is in the movie; McKenzie's disappearance into the character is so total that the moment feels scripted.

Surprisingly, the Last Night in Soho and Lost Girls actress isn't from New England, or even the States, but rather New Zealand. A lot of research went into crafting McKenzie’s complicated plane Jane. She used Moshfegh’s book as a bible but also shadowed a prison secretary outside of New Jersey and talked with a former prison psychologist to get a feel of what it was like to be a woman working in that specific male-dominated field. And to master a New England accent, she studied the voices of Ben Affleck and Mark Wahlberg.

McKenzie had always been a fan of Hathaway, so many of the admiring looks in the film may have been genuine, but listening to Cinderella’s “So This Is Love” through headphones in between takes helped her get deeper into Eileen’s mindset for the tender moments her character shares with Rebecca. “Rebecca is the first person to look Eileen in the eye, and she's never felt love before,” she explains. “So just being kind of completely swept away by that feeling was kind of fun to explore.”

Eileen was published three years before My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but in many ways, it feels like a rejoinder to that book's popularity. The narrative practically dares you to romanticize the twisted sapphic love story or the sad girlcore—and once you’ve taken the bait, it destabilizes you with a haunting moral dilemma.

“When the book came out, no one wanted to talk about the question of justice, the prison element,” Moshfegh tells me, “They all just wanted to talk about how gross Eileen was. It was some novel idea that a young woman might have slightly transgressive thoughts or a negative self-image.”

The world has changed a lot since 2015, when Eileen was first published. The #MeToo movement brought conversations surrounding sexual assault outside of whisper networks and many more have begun to question systems of policing. When creating Rebecca, Moshfegh imagined her to be amongst the first wave of women attending Harvard, and that she’d studied under Timothy Leary in the psychology department. Leary was known for the Concord Prison Experiment, which used psilocybin-based psychotherapy to reduce recidivism rates by 20 percent.

“I wondered what it would be like to really lean into the idea of playing this character who's on this messianic quest to drive the rot out from society,” Hathaway explains, “and who really does believe that she's going to deliver everyone anew into a brighter day and what it would be like to play someone who enjoyed that part of themselves rather than felt shame or self-consciousness about it.”

Shame is a weapon that people have used to silence women like Hathaway and Moshfegh. In a 2022 i_D Magazine piece, cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann explored the phenomenon of getting “woman’d”—the process of the media building a woman up to then brutally tearing them down, particularly online. One of Fisher-Quann’s case studies was Moshfegh, who was dogpiled on social media after a scathing Vulture review intimated that the misanthropy and fatphobia of Moshfegh’s characters might represent the views of their creator. Another one of her examples was Hathaway, whose perceived perfect-star image has long stoked accusations of inauthenticity.

Hathaway says playing Rebecca felt liberating. Speaking in January at an early screening of Eileen, she recalled a deeply disturbing question a journalist asked her when she was 16: “Are you a good girl or a bad girl?” Her teen self, she says, would have wanted to respond with a film like this one, which subverts that binary. Rebecca, like Eileen, is a complicated character—and an opportunity for Hathaway, America’s sweetheart, to really test her likeability.

“She's very glamorous and she's really invented a self, and I think that we kind of have a tendency to distrust people who do that,” Hathaway says, noting that Katharine Hepburn and Patricia Neal’s helped inform Rebecca’s Transatlantic accent. “We'd labeled them as inauthentic or other things. But I think in her case, she really did want to be a trailblazer, and she really did meet with an enormous amount of bias and perspective and a world that wasn't necessarily going to yield to what she wanted or how she saw herself.” As Hathaway dissects Rebecca’s character, it’s as if she’s describing herself.

The question of what makes someone a bad person is at the center of a gripping scene in the basement where Eileen, Rebecca, and Mrs. Polk (Marin Ireland), the mother of one of the boys in the prison (Lee Polk). After discovering a heinous secret, Eileen and Rebecca force Mrs. Polk into a confession, which Ireland delivers as a haunting monologue.

“I was very clear with Marin that she shouldn't rush through the speech,” director William Oldroyd says. “It should be a process of her putting words to something she's lived with all her life and never been able to articulate. This is the only time she'll ever say these words, and they should be difficult to say.”

There is actually a fourth character in that frigid Massachusetts basement: you. Simply by watching the film, you become a witness to the town’s secrets; this intentionally-nameless town could be your neighborhood. That makes it more difficult to assign judgment and blame. Goebel says it best: “There are no easy answers in this film. It leaves people fucked up.”