Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Max Minghella
Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Kate Hudson, Kaia Gerber, Elizabeth Berkley
Shell is the latest in a seemingly never-ending and increasingly tiresome wave of thrillers and horror movies in which a normie protagonist is invited into the domain of a celebrated idol, only to find the latter harbours sinister intentions. We've seen this storyline play out in such films as The Menu, Him, Blink Twice and Opus, and none of those movies have managed to do anything interesting with the idea. Like The Substance and Thinestra, Shell is another riff on Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman, based around a woman taking extreme measures to improve her looks. As such, director Max Minghella's film has practically nothing to distinguish itself from its peers, save for a late turn into unexpected 1950s b-movie territory, but by that point you'll likely have stopped caring.
Minghella's Handmaid's Tale co-star Elisabeth Moss plays Samantha, an actress who was once the lead of a cheesy but popular sitcom called "Hannah and her Heart," but who now struggles to land roles. Where once she was granted face to face meetings with directors, she now has to endure the indignity of auditioning, competing with skinny starlets half her age. After initially resisting her management team's advice that she undergo cosmetic treatment, Samantha decides it's the only way to save her career. She begins a revolutionary de-aging treatment at a clinic run by wellness superstar Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson), a 68-year-old who physically resembles a 40-year-old.
Samantha instantly finds her life improving as she sheds her aging skin for a fresh coat of flesh. She lands a part for which she had previously been rejected, and she even becomes friends with Zoe, who invites her to dinner where the guests are fed a main course of the guru's own shedded skin.
We know from a prologue featuring a cameoing Elizabeth Berkley as one of Zoe's unfortunate clients that there's a catch to all this. First a small mole appears on Samantha's neck, but one of Zoe's doctors removes it and assure her it's nothing to worry about. But then such blemishes begin to appear on other parts of Samantha's body. She also receives the attention of a pair of police detectives investigating the disappearance of Chloe (Kaia Gerber), a young actress who vanished soon after beginning Zoe's treatment. Samantha becomes convinced that Zoe wants rid of her, as her increasingly gross appearance could ruin her business.
Minghella's movie climaxes in over the top fashion, but the movie that leads to that point is nowhere near as campy as it needs to be to effectively pull off this sort of satire. Hudson is suitably vampy as Zoe, but Moss is somewhat miscast and seems unsure of how to play Samantha. With a sharper script this could have made for some entertaining Crawford vs Davis sparring between Hudson and Moss, but the scenes between the two actresses are lifeless, engineered simply to move the plot on to the next beat rather than allowing these women to let rip. The plot moves too quickly from Samantha being enamoured by Zoe to her becoming suspicious of her motives, so the latter's sudden turn against Zoe is jarring. Zoe never really gets a convincing hold over Samantha, so the movie's central idea about the cosmetic industry's grip on insecure women never fully lands.
It also doesn't help that Moss's appearance doesn't actually change after the treatment. Other characters keep remarking on her transformation, but all we see is the same woman in better outfits. You might argue that the treatment is a placebo that doesn't physically change Samantha but increases her confidence, but that doesn't explain why Hollywood casting directors would suddenly start offering her the roles they previously denied her on superficial grounds.
Like The Substance, Shell's central idea of aging actresses being replaced by younger stars is a dated concept. Today's fortysomething actresses aren't competing with women in their twenties; they're competing with established stars in their fifties and even sixties. The problem today isn't that young women are taking roles from older stars, but rather the reverse. Aspiring actresses are now finding their paths blocked by women who have been stars for the last four decades. Young women trying to forge a career in Tinseltown are now up against veterans like Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts, because modern Hollywood values brand recognition far more than youthfulness. Maybe someone will use the horror genre to make a satire that is actually relevant to today's Hollywood, but that would probably upset the gatekeepers too much.
Shell is on UK/ROI VOD from November 3rd.
