6/6/20 - Shirley 4+/5-

A strange sideways journey, kaleidoscopic in it’s hectic vision and manic in its subtle feverishness. It is tense in an unnerved social sense, when you don’t know what to say or interpret because you are adrift amongst the silence of inner dialogue. Tight lipped while bleeding evocation out the edges of its orifices. Horror in the discomfort of leering wickedness and obsequious interpersonal cruelty, but it is not devastating or driving. In astute fact, wickedness is minimal, as is full-fledged enjoyment as Shirley grinds on and on.

This film becomes cacophonous in its dizzying sporadicness. A scattergun of through lines; a rats nest of diligently tattered threads. It is hard to take the pulse of its intent, it’s characters or its tone. Often I was adrift in the space of these peoples’ minds and reality. The gist winds up arriving at some cruel neutrality finish, but was its all necessary (especially the “forbidden lust” twist)?

It is a (film) that leaves you asking “what happened”, but not in a surreal mystery but in a lost motion of emptiness. Interminably long for being so short, because it is a train without tracks or target.

Moss is ticking and brain picking, homely and harassing. Odessa Young was good trying to keep pace. I appreciated the womanliness of this film, a story of hardship and loneliness underlying the female experience - probably accentuated by the massive female crew making this film a reality. That said, I did not like it nor would I recommend it. Gloom blearily haunts not just the film but the viewing experience. I can’t say that it was poorly made or shambolic in its aims, only that they were beyond my skills to discern and my grasping for their purchase left me perpetually falling to my demise.