10 Movies That Lied So Much They Told The Truth
3. Shirley
2020's Shirley was a loose biopic of novelist Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) when she was writing her 1951 novel Hangsaman - and when we say "loose", we mean it.
That is to say, Josephine Decker's film is a largely fictional account of Jackson's life during that period, freely remixing what's publicly known about her with a style and tone that feels ripped straight from one of Jackson's own horror/mystery novels.
For one, Decker deploys tight, intrusive camerawork to heighten the unease of Shirley's agoraphobia - a condition the real Jackson suffered from, even if many aspects of the story are purely speculative.
Yet because Jackson's novels offer perhaps the truest insight into her interior self, using them as the blueprint to make a mostly fictitious biopic might be the smartest and most honest approach of all.
For this reason Shirley isn't gospel, but in modelling itself after the art that defined her life - while wrapped in fundamentally made-up dramatics - it gets to an altogether more profound layer of personal truth.