[Review] Shirley is a Haunted House Movie Whose Ghosts are Flesh and Blood

Is it possible to have a ghost movie without ghosts? It’s a question that kept coming up while watching the intensely mundane Shirley Jackson film (I struggle to call it a biopic) Shirley. I say “mundane,” not as a slight, but because it is, at its core, a tale of three different women at three different times of their lives battling with domesticity, the concept of family and a longing for something more. I guess I kind of lied at the top of this, though, because while we don’t see anything going bump in the night, the ghost of a young woman named Paula Jean Welden hangs over the film with a deathly pall and the implications of her life, and death, are as far-reaching as any poltergeist haunting a Victorian house. 

No, the ghosts in Shirley are far too real. But lest you forget that we are, in fact, watching a movie with genre conventions, the fantastic and abruptly violent score by Tamar-kali (Mudbound) will zap you with its Gothic flair. Newly married Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman) move to the small, yet odd town of Bennington for a teaching assistant position under the tutelage of Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlburg). As Rose and Fred make the ascent to Hyman’s home, in full drunken party mode, people flit by with an uncomfortably tense music score; jump scares without a monster. And when they meet Stanley, dressed as a kind of bacchanalian satyr, he patronizingly pinches Fred’s cheeks and envelops Rose in a hug with dual kisses on the cheeks. 

Inside, Rose discovers her hero Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), discussing a searing New York Times article about her story. If Stanley is a whirling dervish of good times and drink, Shirley is the acerbic antidote. “To our suffering, my dear,” he goodnaturedly toasts. 

“There’s not enough scotch in the world for that, my dear,” she bites back, but there’s a mischievous yet deadly twinkle in her eye. 

Fred wants to be taken seriously as a potential professor and Rose wants to attend Bennington College where Stanley teaches, but the first day of class Stanley sidelines Rose. Shirley’s not doing well, you see, and their former housekeeper is gone. And, well, Shirley has “these bouts…”. And here’s the first betrayal. Rose also wants to have an educational future but with a look from her husband (“they seem to be in a bind…”) and an ominous low string note from Tamar-kali’s score, Rose finds herself reduced to housekeeper for Shirley. 

What follows is a ghost story without a real haunting. As the narrative slowly peels back the layers surrounding our two couples, we see the hurt and suffering that’s buried just below the surface. The majority of the film hinges on Shirley’s writer’s block and an uneasy friendship that begins between Shirley and Rose. Rose, in a way, becomes Shirley’s confidant and writing assistant, digging into the truth around the disappearance of Paula. And if there’s a single complaint about Shirley, it’s that the middle section, particularly as time changes and we shift into the third act, feels a bit muddled. The narrative doesn’t completely tie the themes together as well as I’d want as it becomes a little lost in the weeds.

Director Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline) and her cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (who also shot the superb gay coming-of-age story Heartstone) create a claustrophic and ghostly tension in the Jackson house. As Rose tries to do her job (while keeping up with school work, she tells Stanley later), she’s alone in the house with Shirley. And Shirley haunts the house like a corporeal ghost. You never know when she will lash out with her destructive tongue or vanish into her room to stew. At one point, as Rose cautiously peeks at Shirley’s work, Shirley bursts into the scene, full of sound and fury, and her presence is genuinely frightening. Shirley operates on an uncomfortable wavelength and while nothing physically violent really happens in the house, there’s an underlying tension (helped along by the score) that knotted my stomach in anticipation.

Elisabeth Moss plays Shirley with cunning intelligence and she’s not afraid to wield it. She’s easily a genius who has been pressed down by a cheating husband and a general sense of patronizing patriarchal society. “They talk about me in town...they’re afraid to brush up against me. My darkest thoughts are going to infect them,” she tells Rose at one point.

So she lashes out, knowing exactly when and where to strike. Shirley’s been oppressed and forced into this opulently creepy and creaky house with a husband who only sees her for her gift, telling her, “you’re putting an undue amount of pressure on me, fussing about you.” He demands she show him her work before she gets too far in it, with the unsaid implication being, “so you’re not wasting my time.” 

Fred and Rose, meanwhile, contrast with Stanley and Shirley’s relationship. As the newlyweds, with a surprise baby on the way, they are at a point in their life of trying to figure out the world and their roles in it. And in Rose, Shirley discovers an almost kindred spirit and she knows exactly where her relationship with Fred is heading. Phone calls during dinner. Late nights of alcohol-breath. The Shakespeare Society. It’s all been done before and Shirley watches, antagonizes and secretly grimaces with an understanding. 

And then there’s the missing girl Paula Jean Welden, another real life woman, who went missing on a hike in Bennington. Her disappearance casts a long shadow over these two couples, in particular the women. And Sarah Gubbins’ screenplay (based on the book by Susan Scarf Merrell) uses the three women to present three different stages. Shirley, who may have once been idealistic but is now beaten down by life and a cheating husband and the patriarchy exists at one end. The fresh-faced Rose, brimming with an idealized excitement of a husband, their first baby and college who is just now realizing what life is going to look like in a few years. And poor Paula. A seventeen year old kid. The world wide open in front of her, beckoning her forward, and viciously interrupted. 

Lost. 

Lost in the same way that Rose is. Lost in the way Shirley has become. Three women, under the pressure and heel of societal expectation, in various stages of life and potential romance that isn’t as romantic as it seems on the outside. Alone and lost. And what happens to all lost girls? 

As Shirley says, “They go mad,” of course.