Elizabeth Reaser plays the one in the family who keeps the house running while everyone else falls apart, and she does it in small movements the camera has to lean in to catch. The parts are usually smaller than she is.
Fi1m perspective
Shirley Crain runs a funeral home. In The Haunting of Hill House (2018) she is the sister who arranges the flowers, signs the forms and keeps her voice level, and Elizabeth Reaser plays her with the tidiness of someone who has decided that if she stops moving she will have to feel something. It is the part she is most often given, in one costume or another: the mother, the eldest, the person holding the door while the others run through it. She is good at it, and she is better than most of the material that asks for it.
The career has gone in phases. Juilliard, then stage work and small television parts from 1998, including The Sopranos. A lead in Sweet Land (2005) as Inge, a Norwegian immigrant, which got her noticed. Then the two jobs that made her a face: Rebecca Pope, the amnesiac Jane Doe of Grey's Anatomy (2007), and Esme Cullen, mother of the vampire household, across the five Twilight films from 2008 to 2012. Since then it has mostly been television of a higher order, True Detective (2014), Mad Men (2015), The Handmaid's Tale (2017), with a horror lead in Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) as Alice Zander along the way.
What she does well is scale. She has said she likes the intimacy of working for the camera and getting into tiny moments, and that is exactly what shows: a jaw set a fraction too hard, a hand that goes to straighten something that is already straight. She prepared for Shirley by shadowing a mortician and looking at the dead, and it is there in how unbothered her hands are around a body and how bothered the rest of her is. Mike Flanagan, directing, gave her room for that. What he also gave her was a strand about her own marriage that the series never needed, and we said so at the time. Watching it again, we found we minded less than we expected, because Reaser plays the marriage as one more thing Shirley is managing rather than a subplot, and that quiet stubbornness moved us more than the scene had earned.
The franchise years are harder to assess, and we have not reviewed them. Esme brought her recognition; whether it brought her anything to act is a question we will leave to those who have sat through all five. The pattern across the rest is plain enough. She is a supporting player who does lead-sized work in the corners, and directors keep noticing after the fact. Somebody should write her the eldest sister's story and leave the funeral home out of it.
Biography
Elizabeth Reaser is an American actress. She was born on 2 July 1975 in Bloomfield, Michigan, and trained at the Juilliard School, graduating with a BFA in 1999 after earlier study at Oakland University.
She is known for her role as Esme Cullen in the Twilight film series (2008–2012) and as Shirley Crain in the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018). Other credits include recurring roles in Grey's Anatomy (2005–) and appearances in The Sopranos (1999) and True Detective (2014). She has also worked in theatre.
