Sundance review: 'Shirley' turns a famed author's life into fodder for a compelling mystery

‘Shirley’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 107 minutes.

No more screenings are scheduled.

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Director Josephine Decker’s drama “Shirley” is part biographical drama, part murder mystery, part sexually fueled fantasy, and part chronicle of madness — and all of it held together by powerhouse acting, particularly by Elisabeth Moss.

Moss plays Shirley Jackson, the famed author of such macabre stories as “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” In the movie’s telling, it’s the late 1940s in Vermont, and Jackson lives with her husband, the literary critic and scholar Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who teaches at that hotbed of passion, Bennington College.

In this story, adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, Hyman has just taken on a new assistant, Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), who is recently married to Rose (Odessa Young). Rose is fascinated with Shirley, though the author’s brusque manner on their first meeting unsettles her — but not as much as Shirley intuiting that Rose is pregnant.

Stanley asks the Nemsers to live with them for awhile, and asks Rose to help out with housekeeping — but, more importantly, keep an eye on Shirley, who hasn’t left the house in weeks and sometimes never gets out of bed. Rose’s interest in Shirley grows deeper, particularly when Shirley starts researching the case of a missing college student and contemplates writing a novel based on the case, even though Stanley thinks the subject matter beneath her talents.

Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins — who explored infatuation with artists by creating the series “I Love Dick” — blur the lines between fact and fantasy, suggesting Shirley as fragile flower and master manipulator, sometimes in the same sentence. Several flashbacks (or are they dream sequences?) take us inside the mind of the missing student, suggesting her desires are the same as Rose’s. The audience is left to question how much of Shirley’s quirks are the product of an unstable mind and how much are calculated to produce good material for her book.

“Shirley” eventually becomes a meeting of the minds between the jaded Shirley and the wide-eyed Rose, and both Moss and Young bring ferocity and vulnerability to the pairing. The result is an intriguing “what if” scenario of American literature.