Metacritic reviews

One of the masterstrokes of Sarah Gubbins’s screenplay is how deftly she underscores the differences in the perception and presentation of the sicknesses within this marriage.

Gubbins’ script is tart, verbally lively and neatly constructed, while director Josephine Decker, in her first outing since her well-received 2018 Sundance entry Madeline’s Madeline, keeps a very tight rein on things, adroitly mixing in tension, innuendo and dark humor to keep the drama at a satisfying low boil most of the way.

This is a fictional biography, and yet every moment rings true.

Decker is a superbly imaginative director, which leaves one wishing her creative powers had pushed the film even further away from the constraints of reality. But that’s a downside that comes with working from material written by another artist.

Decker’s characteristically sawtoothed and delirious new film is set in the same latent space between fact and fantasy — a story and its telling — where she located all of her previous work.

Where Decker’s film excels is in the innovative perspective brought to each moment and the talented ensemble that gets to grab ahold of the material. Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg are having so much scenery-chewing fun they practically end up swallowing the single location.

The plot, admittedly, is scattered; this is par for the course for Decker, but in a movie with more conventional bones, the shagginess sticks out. Shirley gorgeously invokes its subject’s style, however, via a disarmingly off-kilter score; handheld camerawork that gets intimate with characters’ psyches; and, most strikingly, a series of unforgettable images that intensify this study of female awakening and decay.

There’s a lot here to digest, a bitter cocktail with many confounding flavours and its abrasiveness will prove tough-going for some, especially those in search of a more polite and familiarly structured literary biopic. But for those willing to sink into the depths with Shirley, it’s a delicious journey down.

Rather than presenting another puzzle with important pieces missing, with this project, Decker provides more material than we know what to do with, and the resulting prism feels intellectually rewarding, no matter the angle from which we choose to approach it.

It’s Odessa Young that does much of the heavy lifting acting-wise, though overshadowed by Moss, as she is the one who ultimately transforms throughout the story. It wouldn’t be fair to leave out director Decker’s visual vision for the film or Sarah Gubbins’ screenplay as they continually keep you off balance from the start and second-guessing almost everyone and everything to the end.