Something strange has happened to Eileen Dunlop, and we don’t just mean the plot of Eileen. The adaptation of novelist Ottessa Moshfegh’s delicious coming-of-age heroine has had a weird birth onto film.
The plot and setting haven’t changed: It’s late 1964 in a frigid coastal town in Massachusetts. “Everybody’s kind of angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” Eileen explains in one her best lines. She works as a clerk at a juvenile corrections facility, goes home to an alcoholic dad and repeats. Her whole world is a prison.