Elisabeth Moss and Kate Hudson in a dark horror comedy

Shell is a movie that is meant to be a guilty pleasure. It wants to be the kind of movie you'd find on cable in the middle of the day or late at night. A lot of movies have become popular this way, especially in the pre-streaming era: ramshackle little films with a cheap sense of humor and a talented cast that can have fun and stretch their acting muscles in ways that feel low-risk to their careers. At worst, the movie becomes a curiosity, not great, but charming enough in its nastiness. And at best, it becomes one of those hidden gems that gets a second life on home video.

This is clearly what director Max Minghella is aiming for with Shella dark and kitsch horror comedy about the injustice of beauty standards in modern society. Six years after her directorial debut, Teenage spiritMinghella is back at the Toronto International Film Festival with another film about someone desperate to be a big star. Shell follows Samantha Lake (Elisabeth Moss), a TV actress trying to make it big in film. But in Hollywood, she’s at the bottom of the food chain, and her team thinks it’s time for her to make a change.

Enter Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson) and her beauty empire: her company Shell has created a new type of treatment that is supposed to improve the body's overall health and stop the aging process. Samantha is initially hesitant, but is quickly convinced by the handsome Dr. Hubert (Arian Moayed). At the clinic, she meets a young woman she used to babysit, Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber), and the two become close again. However, Samantha questions why someone so young would need the treatment. Chloe is new to acting, but is already competing with Samantha for roles. Why would she make changes now, so early in her career?

Soon after they both undergo treatment, Chloe disappears, but Samantha is too busy with her newfound popularity to notice at first. The treatment changes everything for Samantha; she feels more confident on and off camera, buys a new house, and hires her best friend Lydia (Este Haim) as her assistant to manage her newfound success. She even becomes friends with Zoe, who encourages her to embrace her power as a woman to get what she wants.

Samantha blossoms, landing the movie role of her dreams and feeling sexy for the first time in her life. But when the treatment starts giving Samantha unexpected side effects, the facade of Zoe and her beauty empire begins to crack. Soon, Samantha realizes that everything that happened to Chloe is happening to her, too.

Somehow, at 100 minutes, Shell still feels too short. Writer Jack Stanley's script hurtles through scene after scene, without much room to stop and think about where the story is going. Moss does her best as Samantha, but the character is so shallowly written that there isn't much to hold on to. Samantha's transformation is largely internal, where she gains confidence and all her problems seem to fall away.

The story comes into sharper focus as the horror elements slowly creep in. The body horror aspects are among the most interesting, injecting the film with a healthy dose of violence. Hudson has a lot of fun as Zoe, but the film keeps stopping short of turning her into a full-blown camp villain. Everything she does feels a little too tame, too tidy, when she should be getting her hands dirty. Shell is at its best when it's aiming for the grotesque, but the look of the film is a little too clean to fully sell it. The visceral nature of classic camp horror is what makes it so memorable. There's courage in a film that isn't afraid to commit to being ugly.

Ultimately, ShellThe observations about the beauty industry are only superficial. And when a film doesn't have much to say, it's all about the strength of its tone and performances. Despite the film's shortcomings, the cast, which includes playful performances by Peter MacNichol, Amy Landecker, and Randall Park, is ready and seems to be genuinely having fun with the story. Shell It won't change anything in the modern debate about beauty standards, and it may not become the cult classic it clearly wants to be, but it's fine as an oddity.