Shell Review – Elisabeth Moss Gets Outshone by Her Co-Star in Bizarre Horror

There are moments in the unveiled B-movie frightfest Shell that might present it like a wild tipsy camp classic if described in isolation. Picture the part where Kate Hudson's glamorous wellness CEO makes her co-star to masturbate with a giant vibrator while making her stare into a mirror. Moreover, a cold open featuring former Showgirl Elizabeth Berkley emotionally cutting away shells that have appeared on her flesh before being murdered by a hooded assailant. Subsequently, Hudson serves an elegant dinner of her shed epidermis to excited diners. Plus, Kaia Gerber transforms into a massive sea creature...

I wish Shell was as outrageously fun as that all makes it sound, but there's something strangely dull about it, with performer turned filmmaker Max Minghella struggling to deliver the over-the-top thrills that something as silly as this so clearly requires. Audiences may wonder what or why Shell is and its intended audience, a inexpensive endeavor with very little to offer for those who had no role in the filmmaking, feeling even less necessary given its unlucky likeness to The Substance. The two focus on an Hollywood performer striving to get the attention and work she believes is her due in a harsh business, wrongly evaluated for her appearance who is then tempted by a game-changing procedure that offers quick results but has frightening drawbacks.

Though Fargeat's version hadn't premiered last year at Cannes, ahead of Minghella's was shown at the Toronto film festival, the contrast would still not be flattering. Even though I was not a big enthusiast of The Substance (a gaudily crafted, overlong and shallow act of provocation mildly saved by a brilliant star turn) it had an clear lasting power, swiftly attaining its rightful spot within the pop culture (expect it to be one of the most parodied films in next year's Scary Movie 6). Shell has about the same amount of substance to its obvious social critique (expectations for women's looks are unreasonably brutal!), but it can't match its extreme physical terror, the film ultimately resembling the kind of cheap imitation that would have trailed The Substance to the video store back in the day (the lesser counterpart, the Critters to its Gremlins etc).

It's strangely led by Moss, an actress not known for her levity, poorly suited in a role that requires someone more ready to lean into the ridiculousness of the territory. She worked with Minghella on The Handmaid's Tale (one can see why they both might desire a break from that show's unrelenting bleakness), and he was so desperate for her to lead 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 convince, but as the slithering 68-year-old CEO of a hazardous beauty brand, Hudson is in far greater control.

The actress, who remains a perennially underrated force, is again a pleasure to watch, perfecting a particular West Coast variety of pretend sincerity supported by something genuinely sinister and it's in her regrettably short scenes that we see what the film could have been. Paired with a more suitable sparring partner and a wittier script, the film could have played like a deliriously nasty cross between a 1950s female melodrama and an decade-old beast flick, 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 biting or as smart as it might have been, mockery kept to its most transparent (the climax hinging on the use of an NDA is more amusing in idea than realization). Minghella doesn't seem confident in what he's really trying to create, his film as simply, ploddingly shot as a daytime soap with an just as bad score. If he's trying to do a self-aware exact duplicate of a cheap cassette scare, then he hasn't gone far enough into conscious mimicry to make it believable. Shell should take us all the way into madness, but it's too scared to take the plunge.

• Shell is up for hire via streaming in the US, in Australia on 30 October and in the UK on 7 November