Shirley

For those willing to sink into the depths with Shirley, it’s a delicious journey down.

The film is not an easy sit, but hopefully at least some awards-voters will endure Shirley’s crucible and emerge with a full appreciation for what Moss is doing. It’s breakneck, exciting stuff, the kind one so ardently hopes to see at a festival like this.

Adapted from the Susan Scarf Merrell novel of the same name, Decker’s characteristically sawtoothed and delirious new film is set in the same latent space between fact and fantasy — a story and its telling — where she located all of her previous work.

This, by Decker’s singular standards, is an accessible movie. And while hardly a broad commercial play, emerging out of Sundance with good buzz, it’s yet another magnificent starring vehicle for Elisabeth Moss, who continues to balance her Emmy-winning Handmaid’s Tale work with ambitious, involving indies.

Long a staple of film and television drama, this sort of inebriated, one-location yak-fest is hardly the fashion these days, but there’s much for audiences of a certain ilk to relish here amid the refined noxiousness of manipulative goings-on among the educated class.