Shell

If you could restore youthful beauty and guarantee longevity by committing to a few days of mysterious treatments, would you? Would you trust your life and health to science and technology that might be more hype than healthy?

Samantha (Elisabeth Moss) is thinking it over. She’s a slightly unkempt, earnest, talented actress who can’t seem to nail the jobs she wants, and both her confidence and bank account are shrinking. She also looks slightly older than her competition, so at the prompting of her agent and the numerous neon billboards touting its miraculous outcomes, Samantha commits to a treatment from Shell. It’s a success and the result is a glowing, more invigorated Samantha with a new lease on life.

Enter Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson) the glamorous CEO of Shell, the living embodiment of her products. Zoe offers to take Samantha on as a protégé and soon the actress’s star starts to rise. But Samantha also starts to get suspicious about missing friend Chloe (Kaia Gerber), some unusual symptoms she started exhibiting, and what might truly be going on in the laboratories of Shell. Samantha’s suspicions and Zoe’s paranoia escalate into a frantic cat-and-mouse game that climaxes in a high-stakes confrontation with surprising results.

Weaving together genre elements and significant social commentary, director Max Minghella (Teen Spirit, TIFF ’18) finds a way to vividly entertain while inviting us to think about the outsized value we put on physical beauty and how twisted we may find ourselves becoming in the efforts to pursue it.

JANE SCHOETTLE

Content advisory: coarse language