In a year of great cinema, The Substance was by far my favorite movie that 2024 had to offer. Coralie Fargeat’s gruesome, fantastical take on women’s body image was a wicked blend of Cronenberg and Kubrick, viewed through a very introspective female lens. Although not quite my favorite of 2025 (that distinction goes to the brilliant Together), Max Minghella’s Shell is a definite highlight of this year, delivering a similar premise to The Substance from a different angle. If The Substance was a contained, inwardly-focused tale of self-hatred at the hands of the entertainment industry and the male gaze, Shell lifts its head, looks around, and notices that the female gaze is just as insidious.
‘Shell’ Stars Elisabeth Moss and Kate Hudson on Opposite Ends of the Beauty Standard

Samantha Lake (Elisabeth Moss) is a middle-aged actor who is quickly becoming invisible. Managers and directors aim backhanded platitudes at her, using caustic phrases like “non-traditional body type” to avoid saying that she is fat, old, ugly, and unhirable. Of course, none of these things is actually true, but in the cut-throat world of Hollywood, they basically are. It is with this faux delicacy that those with Samantha’s career in their hands nudge her towards a beauty treatment that only the rich and important can access. Shell is a cosmetic company that offers a revolutionary technique that effectively freezes time, halting the aging process indefinitely, as long as the subject keeps having regular treatments. Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson) is the obscenely rich and glamorous CEO of the company — the embodiment of its core values. When Samantha relents and gives the treatment a try, Zoe suddenly takes her under her diamond-encrusted wing, introducing her to a world of perfection, where beautiful people lounge around in beautiful houses at beautiful parties. At first, it seems as though her life is transforming for the better, but then Samantha notices disgusting growths taking over her body, and comes to realize that Shell is not as liberating as it claims to be, nor is its boss quite the girl’s girl she portrayed herself as.
‘Shell’ Looks at the Corporate Side of Body Image

Shell takes place in a wider world than The Substance, with more figures, more layers of authority, and, perhaps most intriguingly, more background. In a move somewhat reminiscent of the enjoyably yet awful Catwoman, the movie is about how huge corporate entities orchestrate problems so that they can peddle solutions, consequences be damned. After all, they can put people of all sizes and complexions in their commercials, but isn’t every beauty brand still relying on its customers feeling less than perfect and in need of their products in order to feel better about themselves? Shell channels this sentiment through the harsh filter of the entertainment industry, where everybody has an even shorter shelf life than in the real world, and that’s if they’re lucky enough to get on the shelf in the first place. Moss plays Samantha as terminally sweet and charming — the sort of person that the wolves of this world recognize a mile off for their vulnerability — making for an empathetic and relatable central figure, albeit a little exaggerated in her purity. Opposite her is the steely Zoe, who extracts all of Kate Hudson’s best qualities. Even in very light-hearted movies, Hudson has always mastered that sly look, with a great use of facial expression to convey that a lot is going unsaid by her character, and Shell is perhaps the best role I’ve seen her in. Zoe is the vehicle through which the movie examines how women eat away at each other’s self-esteem. You know, that high school mean girl mentality that your parents always assured you people grow out of, but it turns out they never do. Hudson plays Zoe as that popular girl who invites the outcast shopping with her, just so she can laugh about it with her friends later, and she makes for both a fabulously evil villain and a depressingly familiar figurehead of female gaze. Hudson gets a wickedly entertaining villain monologue in which she spills all the secrets of the company and its motivations, and it all comes back to power. She characterizes people as animals desperate to claw their way up the food chain, and that the good-looking ones inevitably end up on top. The world of beauty is not about appealing to men or even women getting what they want by appealing to men. It’s much more basic than that. It’s all about the want of power, of domination, and making everybody else feel undesirable is the most efficient way of doing it. Shell gets a tad ham-fisted here, with Samantha countering the villain’s monologue with what are effectively the morals of the story, spelling out for the audience what they are meant to take away from it all, but the sentiment is a worthy one, nonetheless. Shell looks a little closer at the why of such a power structure, at what those on top have to gain from it all.
‘Shell’ Blends Body Horror With Dark Humor

Kate Hudson as Zoe Shannon in ShellImage via Paramount Pictures

Horror continues to be a widely varied and experimental genre that plays with many pertinent themes and ideas, but what is perhaps most striking is how it is being embraced by big names and the wider world. For decades, it has been relatively rare for major stars to fling themselves into horror territory, especially something as gnarly as body horror, so it’s great to see people like Kate Hudson and Demi Moore going for more interesting projects along these lines. Shell is certainly a horror, albeit more of an allegorical one that you shouldn’t necessarily assume is taking place in the real world, and while it doesn’t hit the wildly grim heights of The Substance, it sure has its grossness. It drops the ball ever so slightly with its big reveal at the end, at which point I was dialed up to 11 and hoping for some hideous hybrid creature right out of The Fly that never arrived. But Shell uses its periodic spurts of horror well, usually to squeamish effect, but occasionally for thoroughly unexpected visual humor. In a story such as this, where the failings and falsehoods of real life are being examined, the right levels of satirical humor really help to tie it all together, and Shell has some great moments. Some opine that horror-comedies work best when the horror and the comedy are kept apart, because using them in tandem can weaken the effects of both..But Shell gets the balance just right and manages to pull off scenes that are very funny while also being totally disgusting. It all adds to that distinct feeling of unreality that it’s going for, set in the not-too-distant future with driverless taxis and other space-age technology. It’s all familiar, yet just advanced enough to get you panicking about what 2030 is going to look like. Shell is the kind of intelligent horror movie that keeps itself accessible to wider audiences. Sure, there will be moments when those not-so-horror-inclined might feel like tapping out, but it isn’t an assault on the senses in the way The Substance is. It dares to end on an optimistic note, and after 90 minutes of casual cynicism, it’s probably a good call. It takes a tale as old as time, adorns it with the accoutrements of soft body horror, and ultimately tells the audience members to keep their chins up; that they have the power to break through these societally-inflicted ideas about self-worth. Shell releases in limited theaters and on VOD on October 3.

Release Date

October 3, 2025

Runtime

100 minutes

Director

Max Minghella

Writers

Jack Stanley

Producers

Alicia Van Couvering, Elisabeth Moss, Jamie Bell, Jared Underwood, Norman Golightly, Rene Bastian, Fred Berger, Hal Sadoff, Victor Moyers, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Teddy Schwarzman, John Friedberg, Andrew C. Robinson, Lindsey McManus, Danny Mandel

Pros & Cons

An extrospective script looks further outwards at the infrastructure of beauty standards.
Kate Hudson gives a deliciously evil performance as the villain of the piece.
The movie makes good use of its body horror elements without being too extreme for regular moviegoers.

The big reveal in the third act was missing some visual punch.