hirley Jackson, the mid-century master of American Gothic, was not one to adhere to the mundane or the real. Though in real life a housewife in Vermont, mother of four children and a contributor to magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion, Jackson’s fiction was dark and supernaturally twisted. Her short story The Lottery, which earned her notoriety when published in the New Yorker in 1948 (she was 32), devolves into a stoning ritual in a pious New England town. Her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is a masterclass ghost story in which it’s unclear if the haunting is the house or the powerful potential of one’s own insanity. Jackson’s most insightful and terrifying domain was the gruesome, spectral possibilities of the unhinged female mind, especially one locked inside by fear, or the men outside it. Shirley, a new film from director Josephine Decker which stars Elisabeth Moss as the reclusive author in her later years (she died of heart failure, age 48, in 1965), plunges into a cruelly imaginative world with a Jacksonian disregard for the chronological details. The film, based on the book Shirley: A Novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, retains some of the facts of Jackson’s adult life – her use of amphetamines and alcohol, her flare-ups of agoraphobia, her unabashedly philandering husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), her eclectic, imprisoning house in Bennington, Vermont, where Stanley taught at the local college – but dispenses with the tropes of a straight biopic. Instead, the film leans into the psychodrama, induced by debilitating writer’s block and circumscribing sexism, “so that the experience of meeting her would feel like you were actually in one of her novels or her short stories”, Decker told the Guardian. This Shirley is a witchy, prickly storm, both master and pawn of her house, one who reacts poorly to the arrival, sometime in the late 50s, of assistant professor Fred (Logan Lerman) and his pregnant wife Rosie (Odessa Young). The young couple, invited to stay indefinitely by the narcissistic bon vivant that is Stanley, mirror the older couple in their mutual dependency and resentments, the devaluing of the woman’s intellectualism into a self-serving marvel (Rosie, a student, is ordered to stay home to care for the ailing Shirley) and the women’s erotic response to fanged talent – on the way to Vermont, Rosie finishes The Lottery, smiles, and initiates sex in a train car with Fred. The charge is particularly palpable between Shirley – struggling to write again and obsessed with the unsolved disappearance of a young, attractive co-ed – and Rosie, whose veneer as a winning housewife begins to crack under Jackson’s attention. Decker’s claustrophobic, dreamlike style, honed in her experimental theater-generated breakout Madeline’s Madeline, translates well to Jackson’s trademark slipping of the mental grip – “this kind of descent from a place that is fixed to a place that is a bit more liquid [which] she does so seamlessly in her work”, Decker said. Shunted off from careers, boxed in by terrors of the outdoors, Shirley and Rosie’s relationship deepens and twists in splintered nightmares, shards of dream sequences, glimpses as the house yawns and groans. “She puts you into a dream without you realizing that you’ve gone there,” said Decker of Jackson’s writing, only for the delusion to unravel. Without spoiling, Shirley and Rosie’s devious connection culminates with a gut-punch reveal and an emotional precipice. As in The Haunting of Hill House, the seemingly benign house in Bennington begins to lure Rosie away from the world outside and into a wild, creative fugue, even as the author recognizes the emotionally abusive dynamic of her marriage replicating in the younger couple. Though “I never think of putting lessons in my art,” said Decker, and the film is set in the 1950s, “I don’t know that Shirley’s travails feel all that different from the things that women now live through … even though I think we’re much further along than we were in Shirley’s time, there’s still a lot of confusion around gender roles, households, how do you prioritize your art and the people around you?” Young Rosie, ambitious and desperate to be taken seriously, soon conflates in Shirley’s mind with the missing co-ed, and the writing at hand. “The thing I related to the most in the film is what is your artistic process?” said Decker. “How do you fuel that artistic process without destroying other people or being destroyed yourself? And I think that’s an eternally interesting question. What is your muse? How are you using your muse, or abusing your muse, or possibly liberating your muse?” Especially from the trap of male validation – in Decker’s film, Shirley is her own monster, surly and beguiling, unpredictable and bullying especially about her achilles heel: the opinion of Stanley, a self-serving critic whose opinion of himself is clearly bound in the notoriety of Shirley’s genius. The film’s standout final scene reveals just how deep the well of need for male esteem can go. The ability to work outside that desire has, said Decker, preoccupied since the film – what would a world fully unbound from male validation look like? “I would like to live in that world,” said Decker. “Maybe in 50 years.” Still, Shirley was a predominantly female-driven film, from Decker to screenwriter Sarah Gubbins to Sue Chan on production design and costume designer Amela Baksic. “I think that when you have a lot of powerful women running a film set, there’s a little bit more space for the women on the film set to go where they need to go,” said Decker. “What I hope is that having that many women on set, in that many departments and that many roles, allowed [Moss] and [Young] to really feel supported, that they could voice any concerns that they had, and they could go as far as they needed to go because I think performance, for me, is always the center of the movie.” Moss is not a stranger to grazing the emotional cliff in her work, as demonstrated by roles in Her Smell, as the harrowed anchor of The Handmaid’s Tale and earlier this year in the bruising horror The Invisible Man. Her work in Shirley feels like pressing into a mosquito bite – gripping, stinging, sweet. Her Shirley is singular not in talent here but in the total unpredictability of her reactions – whether pushing out or drawing in – nevertheless grounded in guarded, hackled emotional need. Moss “understands the medium so well, and so I felt like a lot of my role was inviting her to really trust her instincts and to let Shirley get close to her, to not feel like we had to invent a big character or anything like that”, said Decker. “With Shirley, I think it’s a kind of wicked magic that [Moss] channeled, that’s really liberating but also terrifying at times.” The primarily female set allowed Moss to “be close to her instincts and to not feel that the character was something separate from her”, she added. Ultimately, Shirley doesn’t part with any pat conclusions or neat wrap-ups for its muse – “The film is very open to interpretation, and I hope it strikes up conversations when people see it, and then I hope that those conversations lead people to be interested in how Shirley wrote and what she wrote,” said Decker. “She’s a stunning artist who deserves to be one of the most famous artists that we talk about.” Shirley is available to rent digitally and watch on Hulu n the US from 5 June with a UK release later this year