The Furniture: Shirley and the Haunting of Her Own Grim House

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

by Daniel Walber

“A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority,” snaps Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) from her bed, annoyed by her husband for so many reasons. One of them is Rose (Odessa Young), the young bride that has just arrived to keep an eye on both the housekeeping and Shirley.  And with both husbands at campus most of the day, the two women will be spending a lot of time together in this beigely bewildering, story-haunted house.

After all, any house can be a haunted house. And while director Josephine Decker doesn’t send in any actual ghosts, Shirley is as spooky as much of Jackson’s own fiction...

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Review: Shirley

by Chris Feil

Josephine Decker’s Shirley opens with the false optimism of young love with a couple in the mold of American idealism. Over the film’s volleying and spry 107 minutes, Decker curdles it with subversion by focusing on their dismantler: the genius writer Shirley Jackson, played by Elisabeth Moss.

The couple at the center, Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman), arrive in a college town already imbalanced, favoring the advancement of his studies over her own. Fred is under the leadership of writer and professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), the husband of Jackson, with Rose and Fred taking up residence in their booze-drenched home. The young couple disrupts their existence with tranquility and squareness, but Rose’s curiosity and oppression halts a patch of writer’s block for Shirley. The film crescendos with the status quo of the campus upper crust, Rose’s intoxication with Shirley, and the wringing of Shirley’s next masterpiece.

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