Shell

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https://rialtodistribution.com/film/shell/

Date Reviewed: 25/10/2025

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a masterpiece and a contender for the most filmed story in cinema history. Recently, one of its many variations (ageing female celebrity takes a mysterious youth serum and finds it comes with an unexpectedly heavy price) spawned a success story in The Substance. It bagged Demi Moore an Oscar nomination and won a bunch of awards, so another film having a crack at the formula is no big surprise. Max Minghella’s sophomore feature, Shell, from a screenplay by Jack Stanly, takes a pretty bold swing, too – even if it ultimately falls short of it's goal.

This time, Samantha Lake (Elizabeth Moss) is the waning celebrity who takes a mysterious youth serum supplied by smug wellness mogul Zoe Shannon (played with sly gusto by Kate Hudson). Naturally, things go south, although not in any particular hurry.

Shell starts off promisingly enough. As well as having a smarter title than The Substance, its skewering of the film industry’s obsession with appearance is more biting. The film has style to spare, compelling central performances enhance a tried and tested blueprint and there are plenty of inventive flourishes. Samatha’s main rival, being a girl she once babysat, made me chuckle, and the future/retro aesthetic is visually arresting.

However, there are early warnings that internal logic has gone for a long lunch and will soon be joined by tonal consistency and believable characterisation. Zoe’s ‘career-ending’ psoriasis looks like it could be sorted with a bit of dermatological cream. Nobody does uncomfortably dour like Elizabeth Moss, but in this instance, it works against her. Samantha’s transformation from spotty has-been to new hot thing is hampered by the fact that she doesn’t seem to look much different from the way she did before.

Which begs the question, why would popular yet shallow Zoe put so much effort into befriending a sad sack like Samantha? And would Samantha really be so enamoured with an obviously insincere diva, who may as well have I am the bad guy tattooed on her forehead? Both Hudson and Moss are great actresses and watching them do their thing is a treat. The problem is, they seem to be acting in different films - Moss brooding her way through a low-key drama while Hudson has a splendid time auditioning to be the next Bond villain. The slow build-up of dread is well handled but when your movie is billed as a horror comedy, you expect more humour and a few actual scares.

And then, three-quarters of the way through Shell, the fast-becoming-notorious twist appears.

To say the final act is divisive is an understatement. Many critics and viewers have thrown up their hands at a momentous swerve towards the ridiculous, derailing the painstakingly built tension and undercutting the film's social commentary by suddenly morphing into a bizarre, over-the-top creature feature.

They have a point. While audacious, the shock ending seems rushed, tacked on to quicken the pace rather than flowing from what came before. It reinforces the feeling that Shell can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be, making for a sometimes frustrating watch. Slick but hollow, it lacks the substance of The Substance – making the title even more apt.

It may be a bit of a mess, but it’s also enjoyable and told with genuine flair. And when it finally abandons cultural dissection for a dive into the shallow end of B-movie schlockdom, you may even let out a guilty cheer. A more accomplished balancing act would have managed to keep both those plates in the air, but if I have to choose, I’ll go for the monster rampage every time.

Uneven but stylish, with a nutso third act that makes or breaks the movie, depending on your sensibilities.