Ottessa Moshfegh Wants to Make a Movie About Rats

About midway through the movie Eileen, a beautiful woman compliments a younger girl’s dreams. “I bet you dream of other worlds,” the woman new to town tells the girl who grew up dreaming of getting out. Eileen, which arrives in theaters today, is an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh‘s award-winning 2015 novel of the same name, a noirish psychological thrill ride that won Moshfegh the PEN Award for debut fiction. Eileen, like so many of Moshfegh’s characters, is a cynical wreck angling for an escape route, searching for salvation in dark bars and cars as close to breaking down as the girls driving them.