There are scenes in the dumped B-movie frightfest Shell that could paint it as like a frivolous inebriated cult favorite if described in isolation. Imagine the part where the actress's vampy health guru compels Elisabeth Moss to operate a enormous device while forcing her to look into a mirror. Moreover, a abrupt beginning featuring former performer Elizabeth Berkley tearfully cutting away growths that have grown on her skin before being murdered by a masked killer. Next, Hudson presents an refined meal of her shed epidermis to eager guests. And, Kaia Gerber transforms into a giant lobster...
I wish Shell was as hilariously enjoyable as those descriptions suggest, but there's something curiously lifeless about it, with star turned helmer Max Minghella struggling to bring the over-the-top thrills that something as silly as this so obviously needs. Audiences may wonder what or why Shell is and its intended audience, a inexpensive endeavor with very little to offer for those who had no role in the project, seeming more redundant given its unfortunate resemblance to The Substance. Each highlight an LA actor fighting to get the jobs and fame she believes is her due in a ruthless field, unfairly critiqued for her looks who is then tempted by a game-changing procedure that offers quick results but has horrifying side effects.
Even if Fargeat's version hadn't debuted last year at Cannes, ahead of Minghella's made its bow at the Toronto film festival, the parallel would still not be favorable. While I was not a huge admirer of The Substance (a flashily produced, excessively lengthy and empty act of deliberate offense mildly saved by a stellar acting) it had an unmistakable memorability, swiftly attaining its appropriate niche within the pop culture (expect it to be one of the most satirized features in next year's Scary Movie 6). Shell has about the same degree of insight to its and-then-what commentary (expectations for women's looks are impossibly punishing!), but it fails to rival its exaggerated grotesquery, the film finally evoking the kind of cheap imitation that would have trailed The Substance to the VHS outlet back in the day (the Orca to its Jaws, the knock-off etc).
The film is oddly headlined by Moss, an performer not known for her humor, wrongly placed in a role that demands someone more ready to lean into the absurdity of the genre. She collaborated with Minghella on The Handmaid's Tale (one can understand why they both might desire a break from that show's unrelenting bleakness), and he was so eager for her to star that he decided to work around her being clearly six months pregnant, leading to the star being obviously concealed in a lot of oversized sweatshirts and outerwear. As an insecure actor seeking to fight her path into Hollywood with the help of a shell-based beauty regimen, she might not really convince, but as the sleek 68-year-old CEO of a hazardous beauty brand, Hudson is in much more command.
The performer, who remains a always underestimated star, is again a joy to watch, perfecting a particular West Coast variety of faux-earnest fakeness supported by something authentically dark and it's in her all-too-brief scenes that we see what the film had the potential to become. Coupled with a more fitting sparring partner and a sharper script, the film could have played like a feverishly mean 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 sharp or as intelligent as it might have been, satire kept to its most obvious (the ending relying on the use of an NDA is funnier in theory than realization). Minghella doesn't seem sure in what he's really trying to make, his film as plainly, slowly filmed as a TV drama with an just as bad score. If he's trying to do a knowing direct imitation of a cheap cassette scare, then he hasn't taken it sufficiently into conscious mimicry to make it believable. Shell should take us all the way over the edge, but it's too fearful to make the jump.
Shell is up for hire online in the US, in Australia on 30 October and in the UK on 7 November
