Shell Game

The most surprising thriller I've encountered in a long, long time

Hello, yes, I’m back! It’s been a hot minute, I know. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a thriller I watched recently called Shell. I watch a lot of thrillers and horror movies. A lot. As a result, it’s hard to surprise me. I generally know where a movie is going because I’ve seen it, or a version of it, several times before.

I had absolutely no idea that Shell was going to do what it did. And that deserves some praise and consideration. (Spoilers will follow, so if you want to go hunt this movie down and come back, now is the time to depart. It’s currently streaming on Paramount+.)

As you can see from the trailer above, Shell is very Substance-adjacent: Elizabeth Moss is a talented actress who’s having trouble finding work because she has the audacity to be in her 40s. Her agents suggest she do what “everyone” is doing — get a little work done. Kate Hudson is the mogul of a beauty empire called Shell, which has a revolutionary treatment that will not only make you look younger, but will keep you that way forever. It’s derived from crustaceans, lobsters in particular, which don’t age, per se, they merely shed their skin on an annual basis. (That bit is actually true!) Moss is reluctant, but eventually goes for the treatment, because if she didn’t, there wouldn’t be a movie.

So, certainly not the most original story, but they do a good job of telling it. Nothing hits you over the head too hard, we see just enough of Moss’ struggles to understand both her concerns and why she goes through with it, and Hudson swans in to make the reward seem more than worth the risk. The near-future setting is just enough to make the technology a hand-wave but not enough to feel unrelatable. Self-driving cars and phones that go on your wrist slap-bracelet style are plausible enough entry points that you don’t think too hard about what Shell’s treatment would actually have to do on a genetic level to work.

The one thing that breaks all of this is the agents’ suggestion that Moss is “fat”. I was expecting some kind of “and look at her body noooooooow” reveal, but it never came. She’s costumed in huge (extremely comfy looking) hoodies and overcoats throughout the movie; even when she’s dressed up for a party, she’s wearing a jacket. Bizarre choice, but it made me wonder if she was perhaps pregnant during filming, or something.

Anyway, the story proceeds exactly how you expect it will. Moss has the treatment, lands the part in a movie she originally lost to someone younger (who she used to babysit, in fact), and becomes besties with Hudson’s character. And then of course starts having side effects because if she didn’t there wouldn’t be a movie. As soon as you discover that other people who’ve had the treatment have gone missing, you know where this is leading: Hudson et al quietly make them go away rather than risk their share value.

But let me quickly brush that aside to say that it doesn’t matter that you know exactly where this is going. There’s a common belief that movies have to do something extraordinary in order to be worth your while and that’s just not true. Does a hamburger have to blow your mind? No, it just has to be made well and delicious. A little salt, well-cooked meat, a nice fresh bun, and you’re very happy. (Ok, get some cheese and a fried egg, too, that shit is magic.) Shell is trodding extremely familiar ground, but that doesn’t make Hudson’s hissed chastisement of Moss for being “ungrateful” any less fun to watch.

But Susan, I hear you say, didn’t you start this off by talking about how much Shell surprised you? Why, yes, I did. Because what happens next is…I…ok, let me just lay it out for you.

Again, major spoilers. You’ve been warned.

So the side effects Moss was experiencing were hard, black growths on her skin and she vomited up dark liquid — liquid that looks remarkably like lobster blood. She finds the doctor who worked at Shell who gave her the treatment, and he manages to burn off all the growths with acid. While she’s at his apartment, she finds medication for one of the people who went missing (coincidentally, the girl Moss lost the part to, who had also had the treatment from Shell). She asks why he has this girl’s medication, he tells her they were in a relationship, she realizes he’s probably why she disappeared and goes searching through his apartment for her. And finds her locked away in a back room.

At this point, goons from Shell break in, kill the doctor and kidnap Moss to bring her back to Shell and buy her silence. Now, to be fair, I should’ve realized something was up at this point, because Randall Park was playing Shell’s lawyer. But hey, comedians take on serious roles all the time, so I didn’t think anything of it. Park says we’ll not only heal you, but we’ll make you rich, just sign the NDA and Moss says no way, I’m taking Chloe (the missing girl she used to babysit) and leaving. Hudson assures her Chloe can’t go anywhere and will be better off staying at Shell where doctors can treat her…and then instructs her people to bring Chloe in to prove her point.

Now, again, you know where this is going. Chloe is going to be some kind of malformed half-lobster girl, horribly mutated by her desire to stay young and beautiful forever. Oh, if only we didn’t hate women so much that we didn’t demand they destroy themselves to maintain their blah blah blah ok, yeah, I just wanted to see what kind of makeup or effect they were going to do. Frankly, I didn’t think there was anything they could create that would be on par with what the movie had provided to that point. I mean, familiar plot beats aside, this was a legit thriller. There were stakes, there was tension, there was solid world-building and Moss and Hudson were both really, really good as foils for each other.

Which is why I was genuinely unprepared for the giant lobster to spring from the back of the van and start eating people.

Not lobsterish. Not lobsterlike. Just a full-on giant lobster running around and snapping people’s heads off with its claws.

And here’s the thing: it wasn’t meant to be scary. This wasn’t a case of them going for horrifying and just misjudging. It was clearly intended to be funny. As Moss runs away from the now very-distracted people who were holding her captive, she rescues her friend who had also been kidnapped and sums up the situation as “Chloe has turned into a giant lobster and is running around killing people” (or words to that effect). Is she scared? No. Just kind of quietly impressed, the way you’d be if you saw a dog driving a bicycle. More of a “Huh, look at that” than an “Oh, no!” Later, Hudson takes cover in the glass tube where patients stand to receive the youth treatment. Chloe the giant lobster closes the door on her and then slams the controls with her giant lobster claw to turn it on. At which point, it cooks Hudson until she explodes while Moss watches in wide-eyed delight.

So, to recap: 3/4 of Shell is a straight-down-the-middle thriller, and then the last quarter is a bonkers, over-the-top bloodbath clearly designed to make you laugh. It is a decision I do not understand, but adore. It was apparently always the intention, too, at least if this interview is to be believed. It’s a bold choice, Cotton, and I respect it.

Because here’s the thing: a lot of horror movies end up being accidentally funny because an effect doesn’t quite land. Either the director wildly overestimates how scary something will be, or it just doesn’t quite make the transition from the page to the screen. This most recently happened with Until Dawn, where a bunch of college students drink tainted water that makes them explode. I know it sounds ridiculous when put like that, but in context, it could’ve been effectively gruesome. Instead, people take a sip, their tummies grumble, and then they pop like a watermelon dropped from a third story balcony onto a concrete driveway.

Not that I’ve ever done that, of course. *cough*

Up until that point, Until Dawn was doing a fairly good job of creating the atmosphere necessary for its story, but once people start bursting like overfilled water balloons, you can’t help but laugh. You can keep watching to see what happens, but any chance you had of being scared is totally out the window. Even the Final Destination films, which have increasingly absurd deaths, aren’t funny per se. You know what’s coming, and what’s coming is absolutely ridiculous, but we still recoil in shock or revulsion as the various terrible fates befall the hapless victims. If we laugh, we are laughing with the film, not at it, because we are in on the joke.

It’s a difficult balance, so you can see why Shell chooses to not take the risk and instead just fully lean into it. “Yes, this is stupid, and there’s no way we can make it not stupid, so we’re not going to try. Enjoy this giant lobster going house on everyone.” And you know, in its own very weird way, it works.

I’ll never watch this movie ever again — ok I might watch the Chloe reveal again because it is just so wonderfully stupid — but I will tell people to watch it whenever possible. With the appropriate warning, of course, that while I can’t call the movie good, I will certainly call it memorable.