In Shell, Elisabeth Moss stars as Samantha Lake, a thirty-something actress whose career is already on the decline due to Hollywood’s penchant for prioritizing beauty and youth over talent. When Samantha seeks out help via wellness guru Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson) and her company, also called Shell, her life transforms overnight. Naturally, this is all too good to be true.
There are a lot of elements that work in Shell, from its stylish production design to the cast, which also includes Kaia Gerber, Elizabeth Berkley, Arian Moyadm, and Amy Landecker. Max Minghella, in his sophomore feature as director, gives Los Angeles a distinctly retro-future feel that adds another layer of silliness to the proceedings. Still, Shell takes too long to unravel its central mystery and once it gets to the body horror it teases at the start of the film, the movie begins to pull its punches.
Shell Is More Of A Comedy Than A Horror Movie
But It’s Not Able To Blend The Two Completely
It’s difficult not to think of 2024’s other body horror movie about women aging when watching Shell, especially considering both screened at the Toronto International Film Festival where Shell is premiering. But whereas The Substance is a no-holds-barred gore fest, Shell seems hesitant to lean into its nastier sensibilities. This is after an opening sequence that sees Berkley appear in a brutal scene that sets up the terror to come.
From there, though, Shell is more comedy than horror, kooky and borderline camp in its depiction of the wellness industry and Hollywood. In striking this tone, though, Shell fails to follow through on the promise of its beginning for a majority of its runtime and by the time it gets to where it needs to be, the shift doesn’t fully work.
The source of this anti-aging mystery in Shell is even funnier, manifesting in a climactic monster moment that finally nails the tone the movie has been searching for.
What does work is Shell’s beauty and wellness satire, an element of the film that feels all too real. Everywhere you look, people are searching for the trick to avoid or even stop aging (tech mogul Bryan Johnson, who injects his 17-year-old son’s blood into his body and reportedly spends $2 million dollars a year to look young immediately comes to mind).
The source of this anti-aging mystery in Shell is even funnier, manifesting in a climactic monster moment that finally nails the tone the movie has been searching for. But just when it starts to get things right, Minghella’s assured direction becomes chaotic, almost as if the camera is afraid to fully look into the eyes of the evil that Shell has created.
If it weren’t for Shell‘s cast, though, I’m afraid none of this would work. We get to see Moss be funny in a way that many of her recent roles, most notably The Handmaid’s Tale, haven’t allowed her to be. Hudson is utterly devilish as Zoe Shannon, eating up every scene she’s in, vacillating between girl’s girl and corporate monster with a frightening breeziness.
It’s a great showcase for the pair, bolstered by fun supporting performances and appearances, inluding Ziwe as a media executive and Este Haim as Samantha’s hapless friend/assistant. Unfortunately, despite all of these disparate elements working, it never coalesces into something cohesive. It’s fun – there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments satirizing the vanity of Hollywood and the film industry.
There are also a couple of really gross body horror moments, but this is when Shell seems afraid to linger too long. It seems as if it’s saving a big reveal for us, but that never really comes, even when a monster is stalking a warehouse at the end of the movie, searching for anything it can get its claws on. Shell is funny and nice to look at it, but it lacks the depth or the darkness that it needs.
Shell had its premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The film is 100 minutes long and rated for violent content, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity and language.