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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more