Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during Toronto 2024 Film Festival. Republic Pictures release ”Shell“In selected theaters on Friday 3 October.
Some movies suffer due to bad timing. “Shell” would not be a very good movie under any circumstances, but it will be particularly bad against Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”, A better and more upsetting film that is about very similar topics. “Outrageous” is what director Max Minghella goes here. And when it accepts its fate as a 50’s rubber-SCI-Fi monster movie, “Shell” has a camp value for it. Even then, it still does not undertake a little hard enough to make it successful.
There are some fun moments in the “Shell” boat intentional and unintentional and some eye-catching images. The first living creature to appear on the screen is a fluffy lap dog smeared with blood, which combines the two; It trotting down a dark hall in a mansion in the 80s, its little legs move as soon as they can. The camera follows the dog into a retro tiled bathroom, where Elizabeth Berkley sits in a skull bath with a matching silk coat that cuts groteske black shocks from the leg. She is freaking. The bathtub is slippery with blood. She passes out and releases the knife, and the dog starts lick it clean.
It is a promising cold open, one that leads into a troubled mix of attempts at pathos and tired entertainment industry-satire when Samantha (Elisabeth Moss) goes out for what she thinks is a meeting with the director of one of the beaten indie movies Moss sometimes stars in reality. It turns out to be an open audition, and Samantha loses the role – a divorced single mother of two – to the “IT” girl Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber). Chloe is barely old enough to drink, let alone have two children, but she is hot and popular on social media so there you go. The experience leads Samantha’s representatives (one of which is played by Ziwe, perfect Cast) to suggest, their voices thick with tasty Faux-Consum, that she rests at Shell Clinic for a while.
CEO Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson) is the face of Shell, a company whose services mix elements of “Death becomes her” and “The lobster.” In a spa-like atmosphere, people who Samantha can ward off their fear of irrelevance by undergoing an outpatient procedure where their DNA is melted with DNA from a lobster, or something, resulting in a younger, stronger, higher version of themselves with clear skin and bright eyes. Much is explained, but none of it gets stuck. The only thing that lands are the cutting jokes, which, again, are nothing new – did you know that Los Angeles is a shallow and unclear place? – But get some chuckles right now.
The satire here is clumsy, gesture on similar points that have already been made in better movies. There is a rule in comedy that if you have to explain a joke, it is not a very good joke, and a similar type of ambiguity is played here. It is not always clear about, say, a montage set on “going on sunshine” after her shell treatment improves Samanta’s life is a heavy-in-cheek parody of cheesy 80s films, or if it is just plain cheese. This binds everything to the Camp factor, as could Also used to explain away choppy details such as Samanta’s cat as a stand-in for her spinsterhood. Hypothetically.
“Shell” also likes body fear, but again it does not undertake hard enough to really distinguish itself in that area. Samantha Barfs up a black bile, and Zoe’s sycofants eat her skin at a dinner party on a bit that briefly frames her as a Christ figure but does not go anywhere. Then there are the bumps that appear when the procedure goes wrong “, which in the film is referred to in the film as” scales “but is more like the type of clumsy mole that would lead to a visit to the dermatologist. A whole rash of them is quite rough, but not as rough as it needs to be. Where is the goat?
Mysterious pink liquids are injected into willing substances from unmarked injection bottles at Shell Clinic, again shades of the “topic”. Even the surface aesthetics of the films are similar: both have an eye for the 1980s inspired fashion and architecture, which is manifested here in the form of silver lamé and curved lines. However, the increased reality in this film is not so well constructed, and with much less intentional: the self-driving cars shown in the background of the entire film, for example, do not serve a special purpose in addition to increasing their sci-fi references.
Everyone in “Shell” lives in this reality except Schlumpy Everywoman Moss, who feels that she is about half a step from everyone else. It is not a failure from the actor, who has proven more than capable many times. It is an indication of the project’s overall clumsiness, whose lack of texture is also found in small details such as the fact that some of the magazines in the film are real (Samantha is profiled in “Vanity Fair”) and others are not (Ditto for Zoe in “people”).
Meanwhile, Hudson understands the tone that Minghella is aiming for here, or maybe sets it herself. Her motif for looking up a friendship with Samantha is insurmountable and predators, and she plays the chilly villain with relish when she bumps around in fantastic dresses and purrs out pseudoscientific bullshit. (There is also the potential for a lesbian subtitle to her relationship with Moss, but this is unfortunately underdeveloped.) Her perfection is supposed to make her hateful, and Moss’s deficiency is similarly intended to frame her as related. But drawing off the dynamic of a movie that also has human risks in it is a project for a more skilled filmmaker than this one.
Rating: c
“Shell” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2024. Republic Pictures release the movie Friday 3 October 2025.
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