Film Analysis – Elisabeth Moss Gets Outshone by Kate Hudson in Bizarre Horror
There are moments in the unveiled schlock horror Shell that might present it like a wild tipsy cult favorite if taken out of context. Envision the segment where the actress's vampy health guru makes Elisabeth Moss to operate a enormous device while instructing her to gaze into a looking glass. Additionally, a cold open highlighting former dancer Elizabeth Berkley sadly removing crustaceans that have grown on her flesh before being killed by a masked killer. Then, Hudson serves an sophisticated feast of her removed outer layer to enthused diners. And, Kaia Gerber turns into a enormous crustacean...
I wish Shell was as wildly entertaining as the summaries imply, but there's something curiously lifeless about it, with actor-turned-director Max Minghella finding it hard to bring the excessive delights that something as ridiculous as this so obviously needs. It's never quite obvious what or why Shell is and who it might be for, a low-budget experiment with very little to offer for those who had no role in the project, seeming more redundant given its unfortunate resemblance to The Substance. The two focus on an LA actor struggling to get the roles and recognition she thinks she deserves in a harsh business, wrongly evaluated for her physical traits who is then lured by a game-changing procedure that offers quick results but has terrifying consequences.
Even if Fargeat's version hadn't debuted last year at Cannes, four months before Minghella's was shown at the Toronto film festival, the parallel would still not be favorable. Even though I was not a big enthusiast of The Substance (a gaudily crafted, too drawn-out and hollow act of deliberate offense mildly saved by a killer lead performance) it had an undeniable stickiness, readily securing its appropriate niche within the pop culture (expect it to be one of the most mocked movies in next year's Scary Movie 6). Shell has about the same level of depth to its obvious social critique (beauty standards for women are impossibly punishing!), but it doesn't equal its extreme physical terror, the film ultimately resembling the kind of cheap imitation that would have come after The Substance to the rental shop back in the day (the Orca to its Jaws, the Critters to its Gremlins etc).
It's strangely led by Moss, an actor not known for her levity, poorly suited in a role that needs someone more ready to embrace the ridiculousness of the territory. She teamed up with Minghella on The Handmaid's Tale (one can see why they both might long for a break from that show's relentless darkness), and he was so desperate for her to headline that he decided to work around her being clearly six months pregnant, resulting in the star being obviously concealed in a lot of oversized sweatshirts and jackets. As an insecure actor seeking to fight her path into Hollywood with the help of a exoskeleton-inspired treatment, she might not really sell the role, but as the sleek 68-year-old CEO of a hazardous beauty brand, Hudson is in significantly better form.
The performer, who remains a perennially underrated force, is again a delight to watch, mastering a particular West Coast variety of insincere authenticity underscored by something authentically dark and it's in her all-too-brief scenes that we see what the film could have been. Matched with a more comfortable sparring partner and a wittier script, the film could have come across like a deliriously nasty cross between a 1950s female melodrama and an 1980s monster movie, 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 clever as it could be, mockery kept to its most transparent (the ending relying on the use of an NDA is more amusing in theory than execution). Minghella doesn't seem confident in what he's really trying to produce, his film as bluntly, slowly filmed as a daytime soap with an equally rubbishy score. If he's trying to do a knowing carbon copy of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn't pushed hard enough into conscious mimicry to make it believable. Shell should take us all the way into madness, but it's too fearful to take the plunge.
Shell is available to rent digitally in the US, in Australia on 30 October and in the UK on 7 November
