Much like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, director Max Minghella‘s Shell explores the hells of aging in Hollywood with vibrant style and biting wit. That both employ body horror, harken back to golden eras of the industry, and screened at TIFF will further draw inevitable comparisons. Yet they couldn’t be further removed in just about every way. While Shell centers around an aging actor who embarks on a risky beauty regimen in a desperate bid to retain relevancy, Minghella opts to use it as a vehicle to craft an escapist love letter to ’90s cinema.
Samantha Lake (Elisabeth Moss) never quite reached the career highs as her breakout lead role in a cloying family television during her youth. Even worse, she’s practically aged out of Hollywood. At the ripe age of forty (a joke), Sam finds that her past roles no longer impress the daying pool and that she’s being passed over for roles within her age group for younger models. In one instance, Sam discovers that she’s lost the role of a divorced single mom to ultra-young model Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber), someone Sam used to babysit. The pressures to claw her way back into a place of job stability prompts Sam to seek out Shell, a luxurious health & wellness company. While Sam quickly takes to the new treatment, and Shell’s defactor spokeswoman Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson), bodies start going missing. Toss in a few bizarre symptoms, and Sam realizes something may be seriously amiss with Shell.
Minghella, working from the screenplay by Jack Stanley (The Passenger), creates a vibrant, quirky tapestry of genres in paying tribute to his cinematic loves and influences. The opening sequence, a darkly funny and suspenseful burst of body horror featuring Elizabeth Berkley (Showgirls), establishes the offbeat, playful tone straightaway. It also signals the start of Minghella’s hat tip to Paul Verhoeven’s greatest hits. The opening nods to Showgirls, but expect the director to find inventive ways to incorporate beats throughout. The setting, for example, is uniquely timeless. Susie Mancini’s production design captures the vibrant, sun-soaked glamour of classic Hollywood but with a futuristic twist. It’s vintage Hollywood, with the unwavering dedication to vanity, in an indeterminate future where taxis drive themselves (like Total Recall), and smartwatches are getting even more ultramodern.
Hudson channels Death Becomes Her‘s Isabella Rossellini and Basic Instinct‘s Sharon Stone for her vampy villainous role, having a blast playing puppeteer who feeds a dinner party her discarded skin or manipulating Sam through the guise of lust and friendship. It’s Hudson who threatens to steal the film from Moss, the colorful antagonist often far more interesting than the plucky, straight-edged heroine. In a film that puts female friendships first, an emotional throughline to guide Sam when things go catastrophically awry, it’s the ill-fated bond between Sam and Zoe that earns rooting interest. That becomes a slight issue in the back half, where we’re meant to cheer for the true blue best friends.
While Verhoeven’s oeuvre becomes the guiding star of Shell– I won’t spoil how Minghella pays tribute to the filmmaker’s ’90s sci-fi epic- it’s hardly the only hat tip to ’90s film. The director earns easy laughs in one scene, an unexpected reference to the comedy Look Who’s Talking. These references capture the zany, anything-goes tone that will either earn your admiration or polarize. More than just pulling from an endless array of unexpected cinematic references, the filmmaker also plays with form. A roughly 14-minute single-take scene impresses with the careful orchestration of chaos as Sam rushes across a soundstage to set and back, juggling needy colleagues while trying to tamp down illness. The commitment to practical effects is also winsome, not just for the body horror teases throughout but for the shift into horror by the third act.
Shell isn’t interested in messaging beyond a vague “corporations are evil” notion and a basic confirmation that, yet, Hollywood beauty standards are hellish. Instead, Minghella uses it as the base for a ’90s cinema revival. The Dark Castle Logo in the opening credits heralds a zany, entertaining salute to the ’90s, an era where films went big and swung wide. While Shell doesn’t achieve quite the same scale, its revolving door of genres and cheeky sense of humor makes for a welcome trip down memory lane.
Shell made its World Premiere at TIFF. Release info TBA.
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