Shirley (2020)
Director: Josephine Decker
Screenwriter: Sarah Gubbins
Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Odessa Young, Logan Lerman, Robert Wuhl, Paul O’Brien, Orlagh Cassidy
Shirley is an absorbing and provocative film that probes creativity, control, and obsession by focusing on a turbulent period in the life of author Shirley Jackson. Director Josephine Decker uses a loose, impressionistic approach that foregrounds mood and psychological tension over strict biographical fidelity, creating a textured, unsettling portrait of an artist at war with herself and those around her.
The premise presents agoraphobic horror writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her domineering husband, Professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who invite a young expecting couple—Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman)—to live with them. The arrangement is ostensibly practical: the newcomers will help around the house and provide some stability while Shirley struggles with writer’s block. But as domestic pressures build alongside the couple’s fears about impending parenthood, the house becomes a pressure cooker where reality, fantasy and desire begin to blur.
Elisabeth Moss delivers a precise and haunting performance as Shirley, inhabiting the writer’s contradictions with intelligence and emotional range. She is alternately brittle and magnetic, giving the character a volatile energy that keeps the viewer off balance. Michael Stuhlbarg is memorably repellent as Stanley, a man whose intellectual arrogance and need to dominate become chillingly visible in his treatment of both his wife and their guests. Together, Moss and Stuhlbarg craft a bitter, combative relationship that feels corrosive: brilliant people who are nonetheless difficult, selfish and frequently cruel.
The film excels at uncomfortable, tightly observed scenes—most notably a dinner sequence that ranks among the most tense and awkward in recent cinema. The exchanges between Shirley and Stanley are laced with barbed humor and contempt, with small insults and cutting remarks that reveal a deep power imbalance. These moments illustrate how manipulation and control can be deployed as a twisted form of intimacy, and how artistic validation can be weaponized within personal relationships.
Rose’s reading of Shirley’s unfinished work becomes a catalyst for a complicated bond. What begins as curiosity and resentment eventually evolves into a confidential, intimate connection that shifts the household dynamic. Decker plays with identity and authorship: Rose, who is both a fictionalized young woman in the film and a character within Shirley’s imagined narratives, frequently seems to dissolve into Shirley’s creative world. The film deliberately blurs boundaries between creator and creation, and between the psychological states of its central women.
Shirley’s research for her new novel—centred on a real local crime—takes on an obsessive life of its own. Her immersion in case files and imagination spawns intense interior sequences in which fantasy and memory intermix, and where the physical presence of characters becomes uncertain. In this way the film depicts artistic obsession as a force capable of reshaping perception and destabilizing ordinary life. Rose and Shirley become entwined in a shifting caregiver-dependent dynamic: as time passes Shirley gains a renewed sense of agency while Rose begins to fray, their roles reversing in unsettling ways.
Tamar-kali’s score is a crucial element, providing a creeping, nervous undercurrent that both unsettles and enhances the film’s emotional depth. The music is at once disquieting and elegiac, underscoring the rawness of the characters’ inner lives while elevating the film’s haunting atmosphere. Cinematography, production design and Decker’s direction all work together to evoke a pliable, malleable reality—one that feels close to a feverish daydream or a memory being constantly reshaped.
Stylistically, Shirley functions less as straightforward biography and more as a conceptual, fictionalized exploration of a creative life. It resembles other films that use real figures and incidents as a springboard for imaginative interpretation, favouring mood and psychological insight over strict historical accuracy. The screenplay by Sarah Gubbins borrows from Shirley Jackson’s own tonal shifts and narrative strategies, resulting in a film that feels both literary and particularly cinematic.
Above all, the film is concerned with the costs of genius: the way intense creative drive can isolate, consume relationships, and inflict pain on both the artist and those who orbit her. Performances are consistently strong across the cast, with Moss and Stuhlbarg providing the film’s electric core. Shirley is challenging, provocative and richly textured—a work that rewards viewers willing to surrender to its uncertain, often disquieting rhythms.
22/24