SHIRLEY – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

I feel like we may be seeing the beginnings of a new subgenre of horror movies by women and about women… and more specifically, about the horror story that is women’s ordinary, daily lives: the constant denigration and dismissal and microaggressions and gaslighting that make up the sea of everyday sexism that we have no choice but to swim in. We saw this with Kitty Green’s The Assistant, from earlier this year, which framed the abuse that women are subjected to in the workplace by powerful men — and men who aspire to be powerful — as a constant low-level nightmare to be slogged through.

And now we see it in Josephine Decker’s stupendous Shirley, a not-biopic of the great writer Shirley Jackson, based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell that fictionalizes a moment in the author’s life as a way of imagining what it might have been like to be in her head. This is a work of domestic gothic grotesquerie of women’s suffocation and sacrifice to the needs of men, always presumed to be more important and more pressing, and of women’s pain and isolation, from the world and from other women who might be their allies, unless we can find a way to overcome the conditioning that tells us that other women are our rivals, and so find common ground. Continue reading…