Shirley

Young married couple Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) arrive at Bennington College to start his job. She is taken with famous author Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss). Shirley's husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) hires the young couple to keep their home.

The film is able to capture the instability of the various relationships but I had trouble zeroing in on the stakes for most of the movie. It's not until Shirley tells Rose the truth that some stakes are injected. Before that, the two marriages have different levels of dysfunction but it only threatens to reach other levels of dysfunction. For me, the movie meanders for the first two thirds and then blows down the door in the last act. There are better ways to build up the tension and the drama in a smoother way.

Just.... Strange. Kind of a weird train wreck to watch. Elisabeth Moss is a great actress and delivers as usual, but it's a little hard to get on board with the story, because you want the "good" characters to stand up for themselves and the "bad" characters are just pretty mean. Upon further recent (this is supposed to be based on the Haunting of Hill House author Shirley Jackson), there is no evidence that the real Shirley Jackson was so evil. This movie version of Shirley tears people down for sport. It leaves a bad taste in my life when famous figures are skewered in movies that promote themselves as biopics or "based on the life of" or "inspired by a true story." Skip this movie and read a Shirley Jackson novel instead!

But the filmmakers decided to make this film anyway despite a flawed script. Dismal directing and over-the-top performances. This film is so damn boring unless you are interested in looking at close-ups of Elizabeth Moss without makeup emoting strange faces at the camera in scene after scene. Just didn't work.

Elisabeth Moss & Michael Stuhlbarg are terrific actors & deliver very strong performances in this uneven film. The script is all over the place, the tone if off and the film can't decide if it wants to be an edgy biopic or another Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? I'm a big fan of Shirley Jackson's writing & wanted to like this movie but found it so sloppily made and un-involving, it was a disappointment.

As other reviews mentioned, it's a slow burn with not much happening. It's really much better depicted as a slow drama, certainly not a thriller. The characters are very unlikeable and while that's often written by design, it does very little to drive the plot forward.