PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Eileen, the title character of Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novel, is a strange young woman with a vivid, sensual, and sometimes dangerous imagination.

Her actual life, however, is anything but: She works a mind-numbing desk job as a secretary at a boy’s prison in Massachusetts in 1964 and goes home to a depressed, cruel father who seems content to drink himself to death. She is hopelessly lonely and a little bitter — that is until the arrival of a glamourous new employee, Rebecca Saint John, a Hitchcock blonde with a doctorate from Harvard, a taste for martinis and a breezy Mae West confidence.

The moody, noirish film adaptation of “Eileen” debuted on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival with New Zealand actor Thomasin McKenzie playing Eileen and Anne Hathaway taking on the role of the enigmatic Rebecca.

As Moshfegh said in an interview Saturday in Park City, “Rebecca sort of sweeps and carries Eileen and the viewer away into something that is really kind of sticky.”

Moshfegh helped adapt her novel for the screen. Before work even began on the script, she, her husband Luke Goebel and director William Oldroyd, behind the terrific “Lady Macbeth” with Florence Pugh, settled on an “eerily perfect shared vision” steeped in genre but subverted with a contemporary character lens.