Shell, in simpler terms, is a movie designed to be an interesting watch that still makes you feel a little guilty inside. It hopes to be the type of movie people would watch when they are flipping channels. This is how a lot of movies were popular before Netflix came along unsophisticated films with a delightful premise that had a wonderful, versatile cast who got to play a trivial- risky role. If all else fails, you can at least say the movie was an oddity it wasn’t good, alright, but just interestingly bad. Best case scenario, it’s those cult movies that people find on VCDs and DVDs and watch several times.
This is quite devoid of ambivalence as can be concluded from the efforts of director Max Minghella with ‘Shell’, a C-horror comedy on the issues of beauty in the contemporary world which is intended to be a satirical film with deep aspects of horror. After six years of hiatus since his first directorial work, Teen Spirit, Minghella is once again present at the Toronto International Film Festival with a new cultivator story about a character yearning to achieve stardom. Shell is about Samantha Lake (Moss) a television diva who is aspiring to get more substantive films. However, in Hollywood, she finds herself in a Cold War society and her colleagues believe it’s time for her to turn the tables.
Introducing Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson) and her incredible beauty business Shell, which has developed a treatment to maintain the general fitness of a body and also put a check on aging factors. Samantha is a little reluctant at the beginning but soon she is charmed by the handsome Dr. Hubert (Arian Moayed). At the clinic, she meets up with her ex-baby sitting charge, Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber), who is also at the clinic, and they strike up together. Still, Samantha wonders why someone so young would require this sort of treatment. Chloe has just broken into acting, yet she’s already vying with Samantha for parts. Why should she have to alter anything at such an early stage of her profession?
Soon after receiving the treatment, Chloe mysteriously disappears however, Samantha is too occupied with her sudden surge of fame to pay attention to it at first. The treatment does a complete makeover for Samantha as she seems to gain an extra boost of self-confidence, which results in buying a new home and employing her closest friend Lydia (Este Haim) to be her business manager. She doesn’t even know it, but now she is friends with Zoe, who motivates her to use her femininity to reach her aspirations.
Samantha blossoms, getting the film role of her dreams and feeling sexy for the first time in her life. But the moment the treatment begins to treat Samantha’s teeth, the carefully constructed image of Zoe and her beauty empire begins to crumble. It is only a matter of time before Samantha figures out that whatever happened to Chloe is happening to her as well.
Shell somehow, at 100 minutes feels way too short. It starts from nowhere and ends on a note where one really knows where the story is headed. It feels like Moss is putting in her best to get the idea of Samantha across but it’s not that simple given the character is not well developed. For a character defined by her newly found looks and few skin cupboards, Samantha’s development is mostly described on an emotional level where she manages to build confidence and all her issues disappear.
As we near the core of the story, the horror elements are more prominent as they are integrated into the film. The body horror aspects are quite effective, bringing a nice touch of violence to the movie which is well appreciated. Hudson has fun with this character of Zoe but the film constantly undermines the possibility of making her a complete camp villain. Everything she does seems a little too controlled a little too neat when she should be dirtying her hands. Shell is strongest where it embraces the grotesque but the aesthetic of the film is rather too polished to convincingly do that. The reason why the camp subgenre dominated the horror genre with its fans is the stunning visceral approach. It takes guts to make a movie and not be ashamed to ugly it up.
Shell’s comments about the entire beauty industry seem to be rather uninteresting and superficial. When a picture doesn’t have much to say, it’s only the tone and the performers that peel your mind to the walls. Narratively flawed, the movie features a playful cast, including Peter MacNichol, Amy Landecker, and Randall Park, who are enthusiastic about the story and appear to have fun. Shell won’t go onscreen disturbing any present conversations about the beauty scale. Nor will it develop into the burgeoning circuits almost film it wants to be, however, it is alright as an eccentricity.
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