Actress Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man, 2020) appears to be on a mission continually portraying serious female roles in dark, emotionally arduous films (like The Invisible Man from earlier this year, The Kitchen from 2019, Us from 2019, and The Handmaid's Tale TV series from 2017 to today). And like a contemporary Greta Garbo, Elisabeth has succeeded again diving bravely into a richly complex, unlikeable, unglamorous title role in Shirley.
A newlywed couple moves to Bennington College in Vermont in the late 1940s for the husband (a slender Logan Lerman, Fury, 2014) to take a teaching position, and this young couple moves into the home of fellow professor Stanley Hyman (an arresting Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me by Your Name, 2017) and his strange wife Shirley Jackson, the rising star of horror novels and short stories. (Shirley Jackson is most well-known for her publications The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.)
Elisabeth Moss is the clear nucleus of this film, portraying a prickly, suspicious, chainsmoking recluse struggling with inspirational focus and a strained marriage. But the fresh, inexperienced, newlywed wife (a controlled Odessa Young, Assassination Nation, 2018) offers Shirley a tentative friendship and some guidance (maybe influence?) for Shirley's novel Hangsaman (a real novel Shirley published in 1951).
Although Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Hyman are real people, the film is a fictionalized view of their lives and based on Susan Scarf Merrell's 2014 novel. Film director Josephine Decker (Madeline's Madeline, 2018) creates a surreal and patient character study that melds crashing thunder, internal doubts, poisonous mushrooms, and entwined female desire. Both leading actresses are dynamic and penetrating. It's more a storyteller's quiet evolution than a tense psychological thriller. Although its narrative focus gets shaky in the latter half, Shirley is an interesting, alluring, and rare example of a film with a lot of metaphorical meat for 2 females to devour.
Shirley was released nationwide on June 5th and is currently available for streaming on Hulu.
