Movie Critique – Elisabeth Moss Gets Outshone by Kate Hudson in Schlocky Curio

There are sequences in the unveiled B-movie frightfest Shell that might present it like a frivolous inebriated kitschy gem if described in isolation. Picture the segment where Kate Hudson's glamorous beauty mogul forces her co-star to use a giant vibrator while instructing her to gaze into a reflective surface. Additionally, a cold open highlighting former performer Elizabeth Berkley emotionally cutting away shells that have appeared on her body before being murdered by a hooded assailant. Next, Hudson serves an refined meal of her shed epidermis to enthused diners. Plus, Kaia Gerber turns into a enormous crustacean...

I wish Shell was as outrageously fun as that all makes it sound, but there's something strangely dull about it, with performer turned filmmaker Max Minghella struggling to deliver the excessive delights that something as absurd as this so plainly demands. It's never quite obvious what or why Shell is and its intended audience, a inexpensive endeavor with very little to offer for those who didn't participate in the filmmaking, seeming more redundant given its regrettable similarity to The Substance. Each center on an LA actor fighting to get the roles and recognition she believes is her due in a cruel industry, unjustly judged for her appearance who is then lured by a game-changing procedure that offers quick results but has frightening drawbacks.

Though Fargeat's version hadn't debuted last year at Cannes, ahead of Minghella's was unveiled at the Toronto film festival, the comparison would still not be kind. While I was not a particular fan of The Substance (a flashily produced, overlong and shallow act of provocation mildly saved by a killer lead performance) it had an clear lasting power, easily finding its appropriate niche within the culture (expect it to be one of the most satirized features in next year's Scary Movie 6). Shell has about the same degree of insight to its predictable message (female appearance ideals are extremely harsh!), but it doesn't equal its extreme physical terror, the film in the end recalling the kind of cheap imitation that would have trailed The Substance to the video store back in the day (the Orca to its Jaws, the budget version etc).

Surprisingly starring by Moss, an actor not known for her lightness, wrongly placed in a role that requires someone more willing to lean into the absurdity of the subject matter. She teamed up with Minghella on The Handmaid's Tale (one can see why they both might desire a break from that show's relentless darkness), and he was so determined for her to headline that he decided to work around her being clearly six months pregnant, leading to the star being distractingly hidden in a lot of oversized sweatshirts and outerwear. As an insecure actor seeking to push her entry into Hollywood with the help of a shell-based beauty regimen, she might not really sell the role, but as the sinister 68-year-old CEO of a hazardous beauty brand, Hudson is in much more command.

The actress, who remains a consistently overlooked talent, is again a delight to watch, perfecting a specifically LA brand of faux-earnest fakeness underscored by something authentically dark and it's in her regrettably short scenes that we see what the film might have achieved. Coupled with a more comfortable opponent and a sharper script, the film could have played like a deliriously nasty cross between a 50s “woman's picture” and an 1980s monster movie, something Death Becomes Her did so brilliantly.

But the script, from Jack Stanley, who also wrote the equally weak action thriller Lou, is never as biting or as smart as it should have been, social commentary kept to its most transparent (the finale relying on the use of an NDA is funnier in theory than realization). Minghella doesn't seem sure in what he's really trying to make, his film as simply, ploddingly shot as a afternoon serial with an equally rubbishy score. If he's trying to do a self-aware exact duplicate of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn't gone far enough into conscious mimicry to convince the audience. Shell should take us all the way to the brink, but it's too fearful to commit fully.

• Shell is offered for rental online in the US, in Australia on 30 October and in the UK on 7 November