First The Substance, now Shell – is there room for more body horror about the perils of staving off the ageing process? Shell attacks the same subject from the same angle but uses different implements. The result is less Cronenberg-inspired, as Coralie Forgeat’s The Substance was, more Paul Verhoeven, a cautionary tale with a leer and yuks.
Director Max Minghella signals he has Verhoeven in mind in his very first shot – of Elizabeth Berkley in a bath trying to hack black lumps off her leg. She was the star of Verhoeven’s infamous Showgirls, a film that all but ruined her career and didn’t do anything for his – two barrels of old-fashioned, bare-breasted shlock, if you like that sort of thing.
Berkley, having done the introductions, and her character in all sorts of terrible distress, leaves the film, handing over to Elisabeth Moss, who plays an actress hitting a career bump because she is the wrong age. Her lack of “the traditional body type” (whatever that means) is also doing her no favours.
In desperation Samantha Lake signs on for the treatments offered by Shell, a tech company harnessing the biology of creatures who seemingly don’t age – lobsters are mentioned, hence Shell – to rejuvenate humans. The company is fronted by Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson), a 68-year-old who looks about 40, a media-friendly frontwoman and all-round decent human. Of course she isn’t really anything of the sort, and nor are the treatments completely without complication. Otherwise why have Elizabeth Berkley hacking away at herself in the opening moments?
That image hangs over the entire film as “it all goes wrong”, as go wrong it must, after Samantha has her treatments and suddenly becomes unlikely besties with the ever-smiling, ever-positive Zoe. But it goes wrong in a vastly entertaining way, it must be said, with Minghella laying on the Verhoeven-style satire as if it were still the era of Starship Troopers and Total Recall. There are phoney, Verhoeven-esque adverts for the body beautiful, a boingy synthy score and a character who is the epitome of female allure, Kaia Gerber doing for Minghella what Sharon Stone or Denise Richards once did for Verhoeven. If you don’t know Gerber, she’s the daughter of Cindy Crawford and has had a modelling career since she was 10. She’s a good-looking young woman with particularly lovely skin. What eventually happens to it and to her is so grotesque it is funny, and it is meant to be. Verhoeven again.
Without giving too much away, things get dark, paranoid and gothic, in a mockingly satirical way. Some actors edge into overdoing it but on the whole that’s because they’ve been asked to – we’re being waved at madly by the performers inside the characters. Moss doesn’t do that and so becomes the still and plausible centre around which Minghella’s giddy gurney spins.
Arian Moayed is also worth a mention, as the company’s chief scientist, the man in a white lab coat who might also be a knight in shining armour, or maybe not. Who can you trust? Not megacorporations selling eternal youth, that much is clear.
If The Substance didn’t exist, Shell would have been given the rose-petal treatment critically. But it does and so it didn’t. If you haven’t seen either film, they’re both good, visceral (in every sense) shockers. This movie’s real saving grace is that it knows that, whatever the tribute act, it’s a B movie from the 1950s that’s been given some youth serum of its own. It’s 40 minutes shorter and than The Substance, 40 minutes lighter on its feet.
Shell – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
