Review: Elisabeth Moss gives a brilliantly subversive performance in Shirley
Elisabeth Moss stars as a fictionalized version of author Shirley Jackson in the new film, Shirley.
Author Shirley Jackson might not quite be a household name, but her work has been haunting American psyches for decades. Both Stephen King and Neil Gaiman cite her as an influence, and novelist Susan Scarf Merrell was so captivated by this literary figure that she penned an entire novel about her, Shirley, in 2014. It's now been adapted by director Josephine Decker into a darkly meditative psychological thriller filled with the kind of slow-building existential dread that is a hallmark of Jackson's work.
(Mild spoilers below.)
The protagonist of Merrell's dark psychological thriller is the newly married (and pregnant) Rose Nemser, who moves to Vermont with her husband, Fred, a graduate student at Bennington College. They end up staying with Fred's mentor, Stanley Hyman, a famed literary critic, and his equally famous wife, Shirley Jackson. Fred becomes increasingly caught up with his academic life, while Rose forms a tenuous connection with Shirley, who is struggling with anxiety and agoraphobia, and self-medicating with prescription drugs and alcohol. But Rose is increasingly troubled by strange late-night phone calls, and tales of a female student who went missing long ago.
Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
from Gaming & Culture – Ars Technica https://ift.tt/2UAebiD