Shell (2025) Movie Review

Shell tries to be both a social critique and a campy B-grade monster flick, but that indecision leaves it as only an empty shell of the two genres.

The first impression I had of Shell is that it feels like a movie-length Twilight Zone episode. It follows a simple theme of beauty and finding satisfaction in oneself, but throws it through a layer of body horror to spice things up. It’s not a terribly complicated story. The themes are worn clear on the movie’s sleeves, and the plot moves briskly.

Mind you, that’s not exactly a downside. If the film is easy to understand, and makes me relate to the protagonist, it has done its job correctly. Samantha is easy to sympathize with. As someone who has especially sensitive skin and struggled with allergic rashes as a child, I too wished there was some treatment that would leave me with a supermodel’s skin. Even leaving aside my personal experiences, wanting to appear perfect and healthy in front of others is something almost everyone should be able to understand.

In fact, that social critique is the main focus of the film, even over the horror. Shell is labeled as a horror movie, but I would argue it’s not very interested in scares. There are a couple of jumpscares, but there’s not that much psychological tension due to the aforementioned simplicity of the plot. It’s clear something will go wrong with Samantha’s body after her procedure, so the film loses some of its unpredictability there.

Which is why I feel going for body horror was the right move for Shell. When Samantha starts feeling the side effects of her treatment, I got involuntary goosebumps because of how squeamish it made me feel. Body horror hits a different kind of nope within your psyche compared to ghosts or ghouls, and so while Shell doesn’t work as a traditional horror film, its body horror approach still keeps things tense in its own way.

However, I wish the movie had a better buildup to its body horror. When the film starts, it opens not with Samantha, but with a different woman who is also suffering the side effects of the skin treatment. Instead of keeping the effects a mystery and just letting terrified voices or background objects do the job, the film blatantly shows you what is happening to the woman’s body. Since the film showed me right away how bad things could get, it lessened the impact of seeing Samatha go through the same ordeals.

Still, up to the final twenty or so minutes of the film, I felt that Shell was keeping itself together reasonably well. It wasn’t mindblowing, but I had shivered in disgust a couple times, and I wanted to see Samantha survive. But then, during its final act, Shell suddenly decides it’s had enough of social critique, and abruptly shifts gears into a 90s B-grade monster flick, complete with copious amounts of gore and hammy performances.

Spoilers abound for the rest of this paragraph. It turns out that the beauty treatment’s side effects eventually led to one patient not only developing hardened scales all over their body, but ultimately mutating into a giant lobster that then breaks out and starts killing people. The finale is about Samantha hiding from the monster lobster while Zoe goes full bond villain and also chases after her to silence her. Then, at the end, Zoe gets trapped in a malfunctioning beauty treatment capsule and explodes in a shower of blood. This is so over the top and in my face that it completely broke my immersion when I watched the movie.

Granted, Shell didn’t start out one hundred percent serious. There were moments of levity, and Kate Hudson’s performance did have some over the top moments from the start. But the film still felt like a reasonably grounded social critique. This sudden shift into a campy gorefest feels so drastic. It doesn’t wrap up the social aspect well, because it suddenly becomes so silly that it breaks viewers’ immersion in its previous atmosphere, and it’s not satisfying in a campy sense either, because the movie has no precedent for things to turn out this way.

This sudden craziness in the climax did make Shell a little more memorable. But this is the wrong kind of memorable, like a particularly embarrassing family dinner. Consistency is key for a film to be immersive regardless of its genre or tone, and immersion is what I value the highest when it comes to movies. Sadly, because of its indecisiveness on what sort of film it wanted to be, Shell won’t be making me shell out extra bucks for a rewatch anytime soon.

Shell (2025) will be released in US theatres and on digital platforms on October 3, 2025.on and in UK & Irish cinemas on

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