Elisabeth Moss is a Shirley of mystery and terror

A young woman is reading a book, absorbed in her thoughts, on the train, on the way home. She who knows what strange mechanisms are activated in her, that when she comes home she sees her husband and takes him to the bathroom to have sex.

The text you read is The lotterya brief history of Shirley Jacksonthe author who played Elisabetta Muschio (The Handmaid’s Tale) will become an ambivalent, charming and frantic character, almost like the sex that Rose and Fred have in the beginning.

Shirley Jackson hasn’t reached the age of 50. Author specializing in horror stories, what Josephine Decker’s film tells is fiction. In it, Shirley and her husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg, a wide-ranging actor, as if he could be in a supporting role in call me by your name or Strange Doctor) host Fred and Rose in their home.

It is that Stanley is a teacher and takes Fred (Logan Lerman, from The benefits of being invisible Y hunters), who sees this as a probable springboard for his career.

But since Shirley is a relationship film, the one that prevails, in addition to that of each couple, is the one between the housewife and Rose (the Australian Odessa Young, from the miniseries high waist).

After a period of repulsion from the first to the second, everything changes almost suddenly. Shirley hasn’t wanted to leave the house for months, which certainly worries her husband. We are in the 1950s, the role of women is not what it is today, and thanks to her relationship with Shirley, Rose will experiment, almost without realizing it? a drastic and essential change.

And so will Shirley, who’s stuck writing her next story, until …

Climates and performance

An acting film, but also a culminating one, which can confuse more than one viewer, as it jumps from drama to mystery and leaves many questions on this other side of the screen.

It is not Shirley a biography, nor a biopic of Shirley Jackson, whose most successful novel is The Hill House Curse, which also had a series on Netflix. Like any good movie, it accepts different approaches. It can be seen as a drama, but it can also be analyzed from the point of view of how male characters exercise oppression rather than understanding of female ones.

Or maybe Shirley isn’t expecting her husband’s look on her new job, the one that took her so long to imagine and translate into words, and the director’s film. Madeline of Madeline – not presented for the first time in Argentina – it is more concerned with evoking than discovering.

“Shirley”

Good

US drama / mystery, 2020. 109 ‘, SAM 13 R. Of: Giuseppina Decker. With: Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman. Rooms: Cinemark Palermo, Cinépolis Recoleta, Multiplex Belgrano, North Showcase.