Shell

Grade: C+

Shell is like if you ordered The Substance from Wish dot com. It owes a huge debt to the 2024 multiple Oscar nominee, and I can’t imagine a review of Shell not mentioning it. This is Max Minghella’s second movie as a director, but he has numerous acting credits to his name – including Babylon, The Ides of March, and The Social Network. His father is the late, great Anthony Minghella – the director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain. The familial connection might suggest a better end product than what we get, but Shell has “straight-to-streaming knockoff” written all over it.

There’s an opening sequence that reminds me of the first scene in a Scream-like slasher film. We meet a character. It turns out to be their one and only scene, but it sets up that something is happening, as we get introduced to the main players that we’re with for the whole movie. Shell begins with Elizabeth Berkley (from Saved by the Bell and Showgirls) dealing with something, and then someone, and we don’t see her again.

We then meet Samantha Lake (Elisabeth Moss), a professional auditioner…excuse me, professional actress. Sometimes we feel more like the former than the latter. Her most high-profile credit was on a short-lived sitcom that was a culty guilty pleasure for some. She sporadically gets recognized from that, but otherwise, nobody knows her from Adam or Eve. She is in the neighborhood of 40, and sees more and more traditionally hot young 20-somethings reading for the same roles and getting them instead of her. One of them is Chloe, who Samantha used to babysit. They run into each other at one of these auditions.

Samantha becomes aware of a hot new beauty clinic called Shell, run by Zoe (Kate Hudson). Zoe is 68, but looks like 46-year-old Hudson. Chloe is a client, though she clearly doesn’t need to be – or maybe she looks like that BECAUSE of the Shell treatment. In his stand-up act, Dana Carvey has likened an Apple Store to a Stanley Kubrick movie. The Shell clinic is portrayed as if Kubrick set one of his films in an Apple Store. Mysterious and cryptic with bright colors.

Samantha tries it out. I was never sure exactly what the treatment was supposed to do, or the rules and parameters for success. The Substance did such a great job of laying out precisely what you needed to do, and keep doing. With Shell, best I can understand, you never appear any older than you were when you began the treatment. Once Samantha starts her Shell journey, we see montages of her suddenly killing it at auditions, booking gigs, and getting attention from men like never before. I think Elisabeth Moss is lovely, but she doesn’t look any BETTER in these scenes – she just doesn’t look any worse. This seems to be a case of more “absence of bad” happening than “good.”

In movies like this, there’s always a period of things looking up and up and up, before the other shoe inevitably drops. Samantha begins breaking out in weird moles and rashes. While on the set of her new movie, she vomits some weird-looking stuff on her scene partner, some crew members, and a Vanity Fair reporter who was there to interview her. Chloe disappears. A couple people posing as detectives (but actually work for Zoe/Shell) as well as an ominous henchman are after Samantha. The performances are fine. I was struck by Moss’s diction here, and how strong she is at playing nervous/timid. Hudson does a sneaky-clever job at hinting towards Zoe’s real age, with her physicality and verbiage. The problem, though, is the ideas feel half-baked and under-explained – not to mention coming off as derivative so soon after Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley failed to respect the balance.

The final act circles back around to the Chloe subplot. We find out where she’s been, and eventually see what she looks like now. I was preparing myself – and almost hoping for – a grisly disturbing gruesome mutation. What we end up getting is anti-climactic, unintentionally funny, and looks cheap. It’s nowhere near the level of Monstro Elisasue from The Substance, or even the humanoid/animal hybrid from Sorry to Bother You. This is followed by a happy ending that comes about too easily. It’s all a hollow representation of ideas done better before. Shell is an appropriate title.

Grade: C+