Shirley

I don't know man. I think it's an interesting idea and there are some interesting things presented but it just doesn't go anywhere for like 85% of the time. And the climax is just....a letdown I guess I don't know. Editing and pacing aren't good here. The cuts are so abrupt half the time and it feels like it never really links the stories of the four people/two couples sharing the house that well into something cohesive. It feels like stuff just happens. The writing the book, the tension between the husband and the grad student, the baby, the affair, the authors weird and disturbing behavior, a freakin lesbian romance that comes out of nowhere, it all just feels like it doesn't add up to much of anything really. Nothing says romance like someone trolling you about eating fake poison mushrooms I guess. Everything else is just alright. The acting is very campy and wooden save for Sthulbarg who is good but isn't in this eough. He's the only one with any emotion or charm or gets a reaction out of any of the other actors. Everyone else is a stick in the mud, not really likeable, or just forgettable. I wish the lighting in this was less dull because the direction isn't half bad. It would also help if these weird scenes actually had something to say. I feel like the end results would've happened even if these couples never moved in together honestly. Besides that I never really had a reason to care about anyone and the interest I did have didn't really make the slow burn pay off into anything worthwhile. Skip This. Maybe if there was more of Michael Sthulberg I'd say give it watch if your a fan but there just isn't enough of him either.

This claustrophobic and disturbing biography of horror writer Shirley Jackson is quite testing, mainly because it tends to confine its characters to the dimly lit interiors of its large house and provides no glib psychological explanations for its principal characters' actions. Elisabeth Moss - playing yet another oddball - is Jackson; her creepily controlling husband is superlatively acted by Michael Stuhlbarg. The young newly-weds who have been invited to stay are Odessa Young and Logan Lerman. It's worth hanging in during the slightly confusing opening.

Very boring, slow, confusing and Elizabeth Moss is perhaps more unlikesble than ever before (and thats a big thing to say for her) For some reason this was presented as a horror. I found hard to focus or care and didn’t finish it.

A contrived, manipulative piece of knee-jerk that has absolutely nothing to do with the real Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman. In real life they were functional, witty, idiosyncratic, perhaps oddballs -- not psychotic, alcoholic ragers. Just read any bio of Shirley Jackson. No wonder their children were upset by this fiction. Also, this story is so predictable and stupid that Shirley Jackson would have wadded it up and thrown it in her waste basket if it had occurred to her -- which it wouldn't. I give the film one star only for the excellent acting, especially Elizabeth Moss.

I don't know why the audience who rated this movie gave it such poor ratings. It was superb. I recommend it.

I'm glad there was an attempt to emulate Jackson's writing style in this portrayal but the probing of the characters never gets beyond surface level observations.

It is legitimate to imagine or re-imagine an author's life but completely illegitimate to invent a character, who bears little or no relation to them, and then pretend it is them. Imagine taking a childless woman, whose life was consumed by self-doubt and then making her into a jolly mother of four ! Absurd and ridiculous. No, that is not what 'Shirley' does, it does something almost worse, namely the opposite. It takes a mother of four and recasts her as a somewhat monstrous and angry childless woman preoccupied by a pregnant lodger. Shirley Jackson's son has complained this bears absolutely no relation to his mother as he has every right to. A travesty.

This was such a great movie, intellegent script, fantastic cast/acting, it kept me riveted to the screen. So refreshing!

Just a bad movie all around. And Elizabeth Moss is such a camera hog and so over the top in love with herself - she's absolutely unbearable and impossible to watch. She was bad before but scientology turned her into world class psycho. If you like being so close to Elizabeth Moss' face that you can count her nostril hairs, then this movie is for you.

Refreshing to view a film so complex. Amazing acting by Moss. Lovely seeing a film about women's issues that is so interpersonal.