Movie Critique – Elisabeth Moss Gets Substance-d by Kate Hudson in Schlocky Curio
There are sequences in the released low-budget shocker Shell that would make it seem like a wild tipsy cult favorite if viewed separately. Picture the part where the actress's vampy health guru forces Elisabeth Moss to use a giant vibrator while making her stare into a looking glass. Additionally, a initial scene starring former dancer Elizabeth Berkley tearfully removing shells that have developed on her flesh before being murdered by a masked killer. Then, Hudson serves an elegant dinner of her shed epidermis to enthused attendees. Plus, Kaia Gerber turns into a giant lobster...
It's a shame Shell was as wildly entertaining as that all makes it sound, but there's something oddly flat about it, with star turned helmer Max Minghella struggling to provide the luridly indulgent pleasures that something as silly as this so plainly demands. Audiences may wonder what or why Shell is and who it might be for, a cheaply made lark with minimal appeal for those who had no role in the filmmaking, seeming more redundant given its unfortunate resemblance to The Substance. Both highlight an LA actor striving to get the jobs and fame she thinks she deserves in a ruthless field, unjustly judged for her appearance who is then seduced by a revolutionary process that offers quick results but has horrifying side effects.
Even if Fargeat's version hadn't launched last year at Cannes, ahead of Minghella's was shown at the Toronto film festival, the parallel would still not be flattering. While I was not a big enthusiast of The Substance (a flashily produced, overlong and empty act of shock value mildly saved by a brilliant star turn) it had an unmistakable memorability, readily securing its deserved place within the entertainment world (expect it to be one of the most mocked movies in next year's Scary Movie 6). Shell has about the same amount of substance to its predictable message (expectations for women's looks are impossibly punishing!), but it can't match its over-the-top body horror, the film finally evoking the kind of low-cost copycat that would have trailed The Substance to the video store 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, poorly suited in a role that demands someone more ready to embrace the ridiculousness of the territory. She worked with Minghella on The Handmaid's Tale (one can understand why they both might desire a break from that show's relentless darkness), and he was so eager for her to star that he decided to adjust for her being visibly six months pregnant, cue the star being obviously concealed in a lot of oversized sweatshirts and coats. As an uncertain star seeking to fight her path into Hollywood with the help of a exoskeleton-inspired treatment, she might not really persuade, but as the sleek 68-year-old CEO of a dangerous beauty brand, Hudson is in much more command.
The actor, who remains a always underestimated star, is again a pleasure to watch, mastering a particular West Coast variety of faux-earnest fakeness backed up by something authentically dark and it's in her unfortunately limited scenes that we see what the film could have been. Matched with a more suitable co-star and a sharper script, the film could have played like a wildly vicious cross between a 1950s female melodrama and an 1980s monster movie, something Death Becomes Her did so brilliantly.
But the script, from Jack Stanley, who also wrote the similarly limp action thriller Lou, is never as acidic or as smart as it could be, social commentary kept to its most obvious (the ending centering on the use of an NDA is funnier in concept than delivery). Minghella doesn't seem sure in what he's really trying to create, his film as bluntly, ploddingly shot as a afternoon serial with an just as bad music. If he's trying to do a self-aware exact duplicate of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn't pushed hard enough into deliberate homage to make it believable. Shell should take us all the way into madness, but it's too afraid to commit fully.
Shell is up for hire digitally in the US, in Australia on 30 October and in the UK on 7 November
