Shirley review – Elisabeth Moss gets under a horror writer's skin | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

As a fictionalised version of real-life author Shirley Jackson, Moss is satisfyingly cantankerous and contemptuous, but the film’s early menace fizzles out

If you can imagine that nice young couple Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes from Rosemary’s Baby showing up at the house belonging to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and staying as house guests until their baby is born … well, you still won’t have much of an idea as to what this intriguing, frustrating film is like. It is acted with bravura and the sort of stormy histrionics and whisky hangovers enjoyed by 60s American campus couples indulging in drunken dinner parties and sneaky infidelities. And it’s directed to create a humidly intense atmosphere of emotional abuse as the women involved plunge obsessively down their various rabbit holes of self-discovery and self-harm to the orchestral accompaniment of atonal pizzicato and jarring piano chords.

It’s a process comparable to the one director Josephine Decker explored in her previous film, Madeline’s Madeline. But this film finally flinches from its own menacing implications and dark suspenseful power with a rather feeble ending of empowerment and solidarity. A very 21st-century loss of nerve.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3e7vRKN