The film begins with Rose and her husband, Fred (Logan Lerman), a Ph.D. To Rose, Shirley is an immediately alluring but frightening figure. Her mentee, the impressionable student Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), is fictional, but she serves as a stand-in for anyone who might be bewitched by Shirley’s writing, as well as for young women in the ’50s who were barred from many intellectual pursuits. Shirley has some of that energy, too, except it’s focused on a real-life genius whose creative energies swirled with darkness. That work was an examination of how the artistic give-and-take between a teenage girl and her drama teacher turns vampiric, as the mentor practically feeds off her student’s experiences. Shirley and her husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), are the only monsters lurking in their home, and that’s more than enough for an unsettling tale.ĭecker’s last film was the beguiling and unique Madeline’s Madeline. But Decker and the film’s screenwriter, Sarah Gubbins (who adapted Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel), weave the reality of Shirley’s struggles with agoraphobia and anxiety into a fictional horror story of sorts.
#A wasted life movie movie#
The movie is set in the early 1950s, after the publication of her acclaimed short story “The Lottery” has made her a minor cause célèbre in the literary world, and it follows her as she tries to write her 1951 novel, Hangsaman. Its core narrative is invented, yet rooted in the facts of Jackson’s life. There are no ghosts around the corner, but demons still abound with Shirley, one of the great horror storytellers of the 20th century.ĭecker’s film is a biopic, but an unconventional one. But that’s the mood the director Josephine Decker wants to conjure in Shirley-one where even a mundane home has a distinct air of spookiness.
#A wasted life movie full#
By that yardstick, Shirley might be the smartest person alive her North Bennington abode is so full of dirty dishes and random junk that it feels almost haunted. “A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority,” Shirley Jackson (played by Elisabeth Moss) grumbles at her husband as he stumbles around her messy bedroom.
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