Shell (2024) Review: A Cheap Imitation of The Substance

I was skeptical of Shell almost immediately. An actress whose career is slipping away discovers a treatment that promises to restore her youth and professional prospects. I could already see the warnings about beauty standards forming from the horrific opening sequence. What I didn’t anticipate was how much of my entertainment would come from watching the film struggle to keep itself together. As its dialogue became more awkward and its plot more contrived, my initial doubts turned into a different kind of curiosity: just how ridiculous was this going to get?

Stream, rent, or purchase Shell on Amazon.

Directed by Max Minghella, the film follows Samantha Lake (Elisabeth Moss), an actress who is inconveniently human in an industry that would prefer her to remain a marketable object. She’s drawn into Shell, a health and beauty company run by Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson). The treatment improves Samantha’s prospects, and Zoe takes a personal interest in her. Then former patients start disappearing, and the company’s attractive promises become harder to accept.

The comparison with The Substance is unavoidable. Shell was already in development before that film’s release, but watching it afterward makes it impossible to avoid comparison. The aging actress, the transformative treatment, the industry’s cruelty, and the eventual bodily consequences all look very similar. I had plenty of reservations about The Substance, particularly its habit of repeating a fairly simple point. Still, it had an interesting visual style, a decent central performance, and enough grotesque invention to make its excesses memorable. Shell feels like the cheaper version of an idea that wasn’t very subtle to begin with.

At first, I tried to give Samantha’s predicament a chance. There’s something recognizable about the conversation in which her representatives suggest that a production wants a younger, fresher performer, even though the role itself doesn’t require one. The euphemisms do most of the humiliating. Nobody needs to shout out that Samantha is becoming disposable when they can frame the decision as an exciting new direction.

But the film keeps stating that problem without doing much to make Samantha’s experience unique. She needs work, she feels inadequate, and somebody offers to fix her. I understood the vulnerability. I rarely felt that the screenplay had found an interesting person beneath it. The exchanges around her career often sound like demonstrations of Hollywood shallowness, with each participant taking a turn to explain the theme.

Zoe’s arrival should complicate things. Hudson plays her as someone who can make an invitation feel like a promotion. Her attention offers Samantha more than a procedure: it offers proximity to wealth and the reassuring possibility that a very successful person has recognized her value. That’s a useful basis for a predatory relationship. Unfortunately, the dialogue keeps pushing the interaction toward broad caricature, while Moss has to be super anxious just to keep the story moving. Too often, I found myself laughing at the strained exchange between those approaches.

The mirror exercise captures both the film’s potential and its problems. Zoe instructs Samantha to pleasure herself while looking at her reflection, then adds that she will know if Samantha fails to comply. Supposed liberation is little more than an assignment, supervised by the person telling her to feel free. There’s a sharp joke in that arrangement. Yet the scene’s insistence on its own outrageousness made the behavior feel more awkward than revealing. I was increasingly entertained by how hard the film was trying.

I kept thinking about The Ugly Stepsister, which also sees a woman’s body put under a regime of improvement. There, each procedure stays connected to a specific hope and a specific relationship. The physical horror develops from the pressure placed on Elvira. In Shell, the satirical premise too often comes first, with Samantha pushed into whatever situation will illustrate it next.

There’s also a more uncomfortable irony in casting Moss as the woman being drawn into this world. Her public affiliation with Scientology makes the film’s promises of transformation difficult for me to keep entirely within the fiction. Scientology describes its “Bridge” as a structured progression toward spiritual betterment through training and auditing. Shell’s version concerns the body, but its appeal also rests on a promise that an organized system can take an inadequate present self and produce a superior future one.

What interested me was the shared language of improvement. Samantha’s insecurity makes the offer attractive, and Zoe’s confidence makes submission feel like a step toward empowerment. The company supplies both the standard she cannot meet and the means of approaching it. Acceptance is conditional on participating in the process. Watching Moss play someone seduced by that arrangement gives the casting an irony more pointed than much of the screenplay’s deliberate satire.

That could have led to a more unsettling account of how people become attached to institutions that promise to repair them. I had similar interests while watching Opus, where celebrity admiration gradually becomes obedience. Shell gestures toward that relationship, but it keeps retreating into the more convenient explanation that something sinister is happening behind the clinic’s polished surface. The attraction of the system feels much less interesting when the plot starts exposing its secrets.

By the time Samantha begins investigating, I had mostly stopped expecting the film to recover. The late twists make the film’s shortcomings even more conspicuous. Each revelation seems designed to force another escalation, whether or not the characters’ decisions make the transition convincing. The performances grow broader, the dialogue gets harder to take seriously, and the climax attempts body horror spectacle with little of substance to work with.

My experience of Shell consequently changed as it went along. Early on, I was impatient with how familiar it seemed. Later, I was amused by the distance between the film’s ambitions and the material it had put on screen. It wants the bite of social satire, the pleasure of camp, and the disgust of body horror. The contrived plotting repeatedly interrupts all three.

I see an unpleasant idea beneath the mess: an industry tells a woman that her ordinary body is a professional liability, then sells her dependence as liberation. Shell has the opportunity to make that bargain frightening, or even darkly comedic, but falls short at every turn. I finished it less disturbed by its vision of beauty than fascinated by how thoroughly it had unraveled.

Shell (2024) Rating: ★★ out of 5

If you’d like to watch Shell, you can stream, rent, or purchase it via Amazon.