“Shell” is a body horror thriller with hints of Michael Critchton’s “At What Price Eternal Beauty?” sci-fi “Looker,” and pretensions of the Demi Moore satire it borrows from the most, “The Substance.”
An actress pursues the latest thing in beauty treatment to prolong her career. But she won’t be so pretty when it all goes wrong.
In the hands of Max Minghella, an Oscar winning director’s son turned actor and then director, it all slowly — oh-so-slowly– unravels into camp.
It’s as if they looked at the rushes, of Elisabeth Moss’s unworried look when “rising paranoia” is what she’s supposed to be getting across, and at her unhurried get-aways, and at Kate Hudson vamping up her “ageless beauty” villainy and just said “The hell with it. Nobody’ll take this seriously.”
And they shouldn’t. It’s “The Substance” devolving into “The Toxic Avenger.” But hey, the laughs are intentional. Some of them, anyway, not that there are a lot of them.
Moss plays Samantha Lake, 40something actress of the near future (wrist phones, driverless electric cars) shamed into seeking a means of making herself younger and thus more easily cast in the eternally sexist-ageist world of showbiz.
A beauty/eternal youth treatment, like so many pills, etc. hawked on TV these days based on custacean shells (but not “from the pristine waters of New Zealand”)? That could be just the ticket.
Zoe Shannon (Hudson) is the CEO and a walking endorsement for “Shell,” a beauty treatment even the young and beautiful are trying.
Shannon’s a stunningly well-preserved 68 year-old, and a flinty, foul-mouthed realist.
“You know what they call a woman trying to ‘improve’ herself? A punch line!”
But there’ll be no “She’s had work done” scars, no “Lookit Ms. Botox!” for Samantha “Sam” Lake.
Next thing Sam knows, she’s landed the role she was passed over for. She moves to a swank new home. But we know there are “side effects” coming.
We and Sam learn that a young influencer-turned-actress (Kaia Gerber) whom Sam babysat for as a child disappeared after her Shell treatment.
And we the viewers have seen the body horror effects starting to take hold of a woman (Elizabeth Berkley of “Showgirls”), bloodying her until she’s killed and stuffed in a body bag in the film’s opening scene.
Got to keep any mishaps out of the media. Wouldn’t want the stock price to tank.
The presence of Berkley and later Peter MacNicol as the Mad Scientist behind this “Shell” science tells us “Shell” was supposed to be a goof all along, and more’s the pity. Randall Park shows up for the finale, another telltale sign of “camp.”
But “Shell” isn’t funny at all in the early acts, and barely worth a chuckle later on. Screenwriter Jack Stanley (“The Passenger”) isn’t known for comedy or satire or scripts worthy of A-listers.
The comment on standards of beauty is watered-down and most overt in the anticlimactic epilogue.
The finale? We see that coming early, and wait and wait and wait for the inevitable to arrive.
Moss is rarely bad, but the A-list character actress seems miscast here. Her “before” and “after” image is no different, and I thought they had her in a bulked-up bodysuit for the longest time, as if losing body fat was going to be part of the “transformation.”
But that’s just a reflection of the very prejudice the movie would be about, if it weren’t so inept.
Rating: R, bloody violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Kate Hudson, Este Haim, Arian Moayed, Kaia Gerber, Randall Park and Peter MacNicol.
Credits: Directed by Max Minghella, scripted by Jack Stanley. A Republic Pictures (Paramount+) release.
Running time: 1:40
