Skip to main content

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.

Continue reading...

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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more