Shirley Jackson “disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis,” Jonathan Lethem writes in his afterword to Jackson’s magnificent, crisply dark last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson, whose fiction swoons with a Hitchcockian vertigo, is today remembered mostly as a writer of psychological terror fables. Whether her action is set in a small, provincial town, as in this and another, early novel, Hangsaman, or in a big, boisterous city like New York, as in some of her vigorous, sly short stories, Jackson had an uncanny eye for rooting descriptions of psychosis in the mundane. One can easily see how her angsty, noirish tales lend themselves to cinema, though her protagonists’ worlds often feel inward, even claustrophobic. Her main interest is in the malice that brims under the surface of civility, an anxious state of mind, a latent horror threatening to break loose.

In Shirley, a feature film by Josephine Decker, loosely inspired by Jackson’s life and work, the writer, as played by Elisabeth Moss, is fierce, skeweringly funny, and also a bit wicked, prone to depression, and manipulative. Shirley’s mood swings prove her fickleness, but if there’s one constant, it’s her undying devotion to writing. Even when she’s not producing, instead fending off her husband’s gripes about her drinking, Shirley is defined by her love for and anguish over her craft.