Shell (2025) | Review
Listen up, horror faithful: Max Minghella has arrived to the body horror party fashionably late, draped in silver lamé and clutching a VHS box set of Paul Verhoeven’s greatest hits. Shell is what happens when someone marathon-watches Death Becomes Her, The Substance, and Showgirls in one sitting, then asks themselves, “But what if we made it about lobsters?” The result is a gleefully unhinged genre cocktail that’s equal parts homage and hot mess—and I mean that with genuine affection.
The film opens with Elizabeth Berkley (yes, that Elizabeth Berkley) carving mysterious black bumps off her leg in a shell-pink bathtub while a blood-soaked lapdog scurries around licking up the carnage. If that sentence doesn’t immediately signal what kind of ride you’re in for, buckle up, friends, because Shell is serving camp with a capital C, even if it occasionally forgets to fully commit to its own chaos.
The always reliable Elisabeth Moss plays Samantha, a forty-year-old actress navigating Hollywood’s particularly cruel breed of ageism, as she’s losing roles to Instagram influencers barely old enough to rent a car. Enter Shell, a wellness company run by the deliciously vampy Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson, clearly having the time of her life), where the fountain of youth comes courtesy of injecting yourself with mystery lobster DNA. Because when conventional Botox just won’t cut it, why not go full crustacean?
The premise is ridiculous. The science is nonsensical. But that’s entirely the point.
Minghella, working from Jack Stanley’s screenplay, isn’t interested in making Gattaca-level scientific sense. He’s constructing a funhouse mirror reflection of Hollywood’s beauty industrial complex, where the specific mechanics matter less than the metaphor. The film’s deliberately indeterminate timeline—classic Hollywood glamour meets self-driving taxis and futuristic smartwatches—creates a dreamy, unmoored aesthetic that suggests this nightmare has always existed and will continue existing. It’s Total Recall meets All About Eve, filtered through a distinctly Verhoeven-esque lens of satirical excess.
Kate Hudson absolutely devours this role like she’s been starving for villainous material her entire career. Channeling Isabella Rossellini’s predatory perfection from Death Becomes Her, she feeds dinner party guests her discarded skin and purrs pseudo-scientific nonsense with such conviction you almost believe the lobster DNA might be real. She’s magnetic, chilling, and threatens to completely eclipse Moss’s more grounded performance—which becomes a fascinating tension point as the film progresses.
The body horror elements, while present, don’t quite achieve the visceral grotesquery of genre predecessors. Comparisons to The Substance are inevitable (similar aesthetics, parallel themes, both arriving within the same cultural moment), but where Coralie Fargeat fully commits to making audiences squirm, Minghella pulls his punches. The fishy “scales” look more like a dermatological concern than an existential nightmare. We get black bile vomiting and some gnarly bumps, but the film needed to push further into genuine revulsion territory to truly earn its body horror credentials.
That said, Shell succeeds wildly as ’90s cinema pastiche. That unexpected Look Who’s Talking reference? Chef’s kiss. The roughly 14-minute single-take sequence following Samantha across a chaotic soundstage demonstrates genuine technical prowess and commitment to practical filmmaking that genre fans will absolutely appreciate. Minghella clearly loves the era he’s referencing, and that affection radiates through every frame of Susie Mancini’s vibrant production design.
The film’s messaging remains surface-level—corporations bad, beauty standards hellish, Hollywood shallow—but Shell isn’t positioning itself as profound social commentary. It’s a funhouse ride through genre conventions, a loving tribute to the gonzo energy of ’90s filmmaking when blockbusters could be genuinely strange and major studios would bankroll the deeply weird. In our current landscape of algorithmically-optimized content, there’s something refreshing about a film this committed to its own particular brand of chaos.
Shell is imperfect, occasionally undisciplined, and doesn’t quite stick the landing on its body horror ambitions. But it’s also wickedly entertaining, and visually inventive. For horror heads who appreciate films that swing big even when they miss, who value ambition over safety, and who still harbor deep nostalgia for the era when sci-fi could be campy and culturally resonant, Shell delivers enough strange pleasures to warrant the watch.
Just maybe skip the seafood beforehand.
Shell is in Select Theatres & On Digital October 3, 2025
