Smaller films are doomed to live in the shadow of major films on the same subject, especially if they come out in close proximity. And so it is that Max Minghella’s Shell is about half of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. It’s got about half the body horror, half the creative vigour, half the execution. It certainly aspires to all the incisive commentary on beauty and ageing in the punishing world of the entertainment industry, but it flies about half mast in those areas as well.

On acting pedigree alone, Shell should have the advantage over The Substance in terms of its leading lady, given their respective accolades. Elisabeth Moss plays over 40 actress Samantha Lake, who’s enough of a name that people regularly comment to her about her hit TV show, in both complimentary and dismissive ways. But there’s the pervasive sense that she could never get beyond that, and maybe was never the “hot young thing” to begin with. Now that she’s no longer young, the only part of that three-word phase she’s got left is “thing” – and the response to her at auditions makes this known, in no uncertain terms.

She reluctantly takes professional advice to become a client of Shell, a wellness company with an ageless guru by the name of Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson) at its centre. Zoe proudly proclaims she’s 68 years old, which is more than 20 years older than the actress playing her – so their anti-ageing products must be something else, to say nothing of their connections within the industry. Incidentally, this is an interesting role for Moss to take, given that she’s involved with her own series of gurus with industry connections through Scientology. But I digress.

Once you’ve walked through the doors, Shell openly reveals that their secret has something to do with fluids extracted from lobsters and other crustaceans – what could possibly go wrong? In no time, though, Samantha is living her best life again, cast in the role for which she’d auditioned but been ignored, and radiant again, or possibly radiant for the first time. But what are these little black growths she’s starting to get on various parts of her body?

Although Minghella ultimately goes for broke in a way similar to Fargeat in The Substance, the experience of getting there is a lot more milquetoast. And because comparisons to The Substance do Shell no favours, we’ll leave that thread where it is.

Moss is quite successful during the opening passages, which also feature some good comic relief from musician Este Haim as her best friend turned assistant. The observations about how this industry chews up women and spits them out are spot on, and Moss has an expression for every indignity visited upon her during the film’s setup.

It’s when Shell has to go bigger into conspiracies and cover-ups and shaky body horror that it starts to reveal its limited means. The black growths that appear on Samantha’s skin are not explored to their grossest extreme, or rather, we get to that extreme eventually, but skip the middle parts where we should see it progressing along its nasty course. Minghella seems to be operating under the constraints of a limited budget for makeup and effects, and the one big effect he eventually gives us is a different kind of effect entirely. It does not feel like a logical outgrowth, so to speak, of what’s come before.

The film also has a strange sense of embodying the very thing it’s purportedly criticising. Elizabeth Berkley of Showgirls fame has a very small role here, and when we say it’s very small, we mean that it would have almost been better to cast an unknown. In theory, giving Berkley this job is a way of showing us that actresses over 40 – in this case, over 50 – can still get opportunities. Her cold open is over so quickly, though, that it seems to be proving the opposite. Though we should say that Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter who just turned 24, has a puzzlingly brief role here as well, which may just point to an overall inability to pay these people very much for their time.

More than anything, Shell just feels small, contained, and a bit under-baked. Minghella is a successful actor who has worked with Moss on The Handmaid’s Tale, and his father was the great Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient. It seems like he’d have access to the resources necessary to give Shell the bite it needs to make an impression.

But he doesn’t, and it doesn’t. And yes, that is partly the fault of The Substance, which we’ve ruthlessly brought back into the discussion despite saying we wouldn’t. Even with its nomination for best picture last year, The Substance was certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. However, there’s no doubt that it shouted what it wanted to do, while Shell can muster little more than a strangled cry. And indeed, if we’re going halvesies here, this critic gave The Substance a 10/10, so it only makes sense that Shell comes in with the final rating you see below.

 

Shell opens in cinemas tomorrow.