Reviews
‘Shell’ Review – Max Minghella Revives ’90s Horror with Escapist Genre-Bending Comedy
Much like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, director Max Minghella‘s Shell explores the hells of aging in Hollywood with vibrant style and biting wit. That both employ body horror, harken back to golden eras of the industry, and screened at TIFF will further draw inevitable comparisons. Yet they couldn’t be further removed in just about every way. While Shell centers around an aging actor who embarks on a risky beauty regimen in a desperate bid to retain relevancy, Minghella opts to use it as a vehicle to craft an escapist love letter to ’90s cinema.
Samantha Lake (Elisabeth Moss) never quite reached the career highs as her breakout lead role in a cloying family television during her youth. Even worse, she’s practically aged out of Hollywood. At the ripe age of forty (a joke), Sam finds that her past roles no longer impress the daying pool and that she’s being passed over for roles within her age group for younger models. In one instance, Sam discovers that she’s lost the role of a divorced single mom to ultra-young model Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber), someone Sam used to babysit. The pressures to claw her way back into a place of job stability prompts Sam to seek out Shell, a luxurious health & wellness company. While Sam quickly takes to the new treatment, and Shell’s defactor spokeswoman Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson), bodies start going missing. Toss in a few bizarre symptoms, and Sam realizes something may be seriously amiss with Shell.
Minghella, working from the screenplay by Jack Stanley (The Passenger), creates a vibrant, quirky tapestry of genres in paying tribute to his cinematic loves and influences. The opening sequence, a darkly funny and suspenseful burst of body horror featuring Elizabeth Berkley (Showgirls), establishes the offbeat, playful tone straightaway. It also signals the start of Minghella’s hat tip to Paul Verhoeven’s greatest hits. The opening nods to Showgirls, but expect the director to find inventive ways to incorporate beats throughout. The setting, for example, is uniquely timeless. Susie Mancini’s production design captures the vibrant, sun-soaked glamour of classic Hollywood but with a futuristic twist. It’s vintage Hollywood, with the unwavering dedication to vanity, in an indeterminate future where taxis drive themselves (like Total Recall), and smartwatches are getting even more ultramodern.
Hudson channels Death Becomes Her‘s Isabella Rossellini and Basic Instinct‘s Sharon Stone for her vampy villainous role, having a blast playing puppeteer who feeds a dinner party her discarded skin or manipulating Sam through the guise of lust and friendship. It’s Hudson who threatens to steal the film from Moss, the colorful antagonist often far more interesting than the plucky, straight-edged heroine. In a film that puts female friendships first, an emotional throughline to guide Sam when things go catastrophically awry, it’s the ill-fated bond between Sam and Zoe that earns rooting interest. That becomes a slight issue in the back half, where we’re meant to cheer for the true blue best friends.
While Verhoeven’s oeuvre becomes the guiding star of Shell– I won’t spoil how Minghella pays tribute to the filmmaker’s ’90s sci-fi epic- it’s hardly the only hat tip to ’90s film. The director earns easy laughs in one scene, an unexpected reference to the comedy Look Who’s Talking. These references capture the zany, anything-goes tone that will either earn your admiration or polarize. More than just pulling from an endless array of unexpected cinematic references, the filmmaker also plays with form. A roughly 14-minute single-take scene impresses with the careful orchestration of chaos as Sam rushes across a soundstage to set and back, juggling needy colleagues while trying to tamp down illness. The commitment to practical effects is also winsome, not just for the body horror teases throughout but for the shift into horror by the third act.
Shell isn’t interested in messaging beyond a vague “corporations are evil” notion and a basic confirmation that, yet, Hollywood beauty standards are hellish. Instead, Minghella uses it as the base for a ’90s cinema revival. The Dark Castle Logo in the opening credits heralds a zany, entertaining salute to the ’90s, an era where films went big and swung wide. While Shell doesn’t achieve quite the same scale, its revolving door of genres and cheeky sense of humor makes for a welcome trip down memory lane.
Shell releases in select theaters and on Digital on October 3, 2025.
Editor’s Note: This TIFF review was originally published on September 13, 2024.
Daniel Kraus is the 2026 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction thanks to the epic highwire act of his World War I fantasy/horror novel Angel Down. This means that Kraus, an author beloved by genre fans for years, now has more eyes on his work than ever before, particularly from readers who might not typically pick up a novel that veers so heavily into hard genre spaces.
This is why I’m thrilled that, by chance, Kraus’ first post-Pulitzer novel is The Sixth Nik, a spacefaring adventure full of horrifying imagination and brimming over with imagination. Like all of his books, it’s an elegantly written, narratively complex piece full of memorable characters given depth and shade, but as with Angel Down, it’s also an effort by Kraus to stretch his wings, work out some prose muscles that he doesn’t use as much in his straight-ahead horror work. If you’re coming to Kraus for the second time after reading Angel Down, you’re going to get something completely different and yet distinctly Kraus-ian, a space odyssey that’ll make your brain tingle even as your stomach is doing cartwheels.
In the future, when humanity has colonized Mars, Europa, and other nearby habitable worlds to varying degrees, Earth is the site of a secluded sect that has made Greenland their home. This sect is responsible for nurturing the Niffakoq, a kind of messianic child warrior whose legacy is passed down in a way similar to the Dalai Lama. The Niffakoq are trained from birth for their “Chore,” a task they must complete that will radically improve some aspect of life in the cosmos, and given brain implants known as “Niks” to enhance their innate empathic abilities. They also, due to the danger of their chores, rarely live beyond the age of 11.
Nine-year-old Sisilla is the latest of these Niffakoq, and she’s just been given her Chore, involving a faraway colonial outpost on a remote planet that’s rarely in touch with the rest of humanity anymore. To achieve her Chore, Sisilla boards The Sickness, an AI-designed, organic ship that looks like a flying tumor, and meets her crew, including everyone from a bodyguard known only as “Murder 005” to a bodacious engineer who revels in changing her appearance through futuristic procedures to a drug-addicted, reconstructed ship’s medic who offers her a chance to try peyote.
Sisilla is not here to make friends. She’s here to do her Chore, fulfill her purpose in the universe, and pass on to make room for the next Niffakoq. But life on The Sickness determines to surprise her, from an entire room that seems to be made of placenta to a glitching robot that seems to know something of her past. Worst of all, though, it seems that something or someone on board is out to harm the whole crew, and the Chore Sisilla’s spent her whole life preparing for is wrapped around a terrible, paradigm-shifting secret that will make her rethink everything about her life, her purpose, and her place among the stars.
This is a lot of groundwork to lay for one story, in typical epic science fiction fashion, and it’s only scratching the surface of what The Sixth Nik has to offer, from ship’s quarters hidden behind curtains of impossibly long human hair to an encounter with worms that left even my strong stomach churning a bit. To pull off something this grand, this multi-tonal and big, Kraus has to lay everything out elegantly, using Sisilla as the viewpoint character and narrator while keeping her in the dark about each key revelation until exactly the right time. It’s not the kind of book I associate with Kraus and his imagination, but he rises to the challenge with a novel that offers something surprising on each new page, a kind of prose sensory overload that almost tips off into being overstuffed. But not quite.
More than the worldbuilding and vibrant cast of characters, though, what makes The Sixth Nik stand out is Kraus’s layered, often cognitively dissonant view of humanity’s future. Technological advances render some troubles obsolete, only to create entirely new problems. Humans morph and shift themselves in so many ways that they sometimes seem to be walking Ships of Theseus. Building ships from organic matter seems more efficient and elegant, yet it fills each voyage with a parade of grotesqueries.
It is a solar system filled with wonders and horrors in equal measure, and it says something deeply relatable and rewarding about the world we’re in now, this mesh of terrors and triumphs, breakthroughs and brokenness. Kraus managed to capture our own fractured view of the present and catapult it several centuries ahead without losing any of his sci-fi bombast or character-driven sense of wonder. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but it makes The Sixth Nik a hell of a read, and a great new primer for the vast imagination of Daniel Kraus.
The Sixth Nik is available in bookstores now.
You must be logged in to post a comment.