There are scenes in dumped schlock horror Shell that would make it sound like a giddy five-wines-in camp classic if they were described in isolation. There’s the bit where Kate Hudson’s vampy wellness CEO makes Elisabeth Moss masturbate with a giant vibrator while making her stare in the mirror. There’s a cold open starring ex-Showgirl Elizabeth Berkley tearfully hacking off shells that have grown on her skin before getting slaughtered by a masked killer. There’s Hudson serving an elegant dinner of her discarded skin to enthused guests. And then there’s Kaia Gerber turning into a giant lobster …
If only Shell was as outrageously fun as that all makes it sound, but there’s something oddly flat about it, actor-turned-director Max Minghella struggling to bring the luridly indulgent pleasures that something as silly as this so obviously needs. It’s never quite obvious what or why Shell is and who it might be for, a cheaply made lark with very little to offer those who weren’t involved in the production, feeling even less necessary given its unfortunate resemblance to The Substance. Both focus on an LA actor struggling to get the attention and work she thinks she deserves in a cruel industry, unfairly critiqued for her looks who is then seduced by a game-changing procedure that provides instant rewards but has horrifying side effects.
Even if Fargeat’s version hadn’t premiered last year at Cannes, four months before Minghella’s was unveiled at the Toronto film festival, the comparison would still not be kind. While I was not a particular fan of The Substance (a garishly made, overlong and empty act of provocation mildly saved by a killer lead performance) it had an undeniable stickiness, easily finding its deserved place within the culture (expect it to be one of the most parodied films in next year’s Scary Movie 6). Shell has about the same level of depth to its and-then-what commentary (beauty standards for women are impossibly punishing!), but it can’t match its over-the-top body horror, the film ultimately resembling the kind of no-budget rip-off that would have followed The Substance to the video store back in the day (the Orca to its Jaws, the Critters to its Gremlins etc).
It’s strangely led by Moss, an actor not known for her lightness, miscast in a role that requires someone more willing to lean into the absurdity of the territory. She worked with Minghella on The Handmaid’s Tale (one can understand why they both might crave a break from that show’s punishing grimness), and he was so desperate for her to lead that he decided to work around her being noticeably six months pregnant, cue the star being distractingly hidden in a lot of big hoodies and jackets. As an insecure actor seeking to elbow her way into Hollywood with the help of a crustaceous skin routine, she might not really convince, but as the slithering 68-year-old CEO of a life-threatening beauty brand, Hudson is in far greater control.
The actor, who remains a perennially underrated force, is again a joy to watch, mastering a specifically LA brand of faux-earnest fakeness backed up by something genuinely sinister and it’s in her all-too-brief scenes that we see what the film could have been. Matched with a more comfortable sparring partner and a sharper script, the film could have played like a deliriously nasty cross between a 50s “woman’s picture” and an 80s creature feature, something Death Becomes Her did so wonderfully well.
But the script, from Jack Stanley, who also wrote the similarly limp action thriller Lou, is never as acidic or as smart as it could be, satire kept to its most obvious (the finale hinging on the use of an NDA is funnier in concept than execution). Minghella doesn’t seem confident in what he’s really trying to make, his film as plainly, ploddingly shot as a daytime soap with an equally rubbishy score. If he’s trying to do a knowing carbon copy of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn’t gone far enough into studied pastiche to sell it as such. Shell should take us all the way over the edge, but it’s too scared to make the jump.
