Shell

★★

MA. 101 minutes

The beauty business is proving a boon to body horror fans. Vanity may not be one of the seven deadly sins, but perpetrators have had a punishing time on screen lately.

Kate Hudson and Elisabeth Moss in Shell. Credit:

Max Minghella’s Shell is the latest addition to the genre. At last year’s Toronto Film Festival, it was upstaged by the macabre Demi Moore hit The Substance , but it does have its moments. As he demonstrates in the film’s blood-soaked opening scene, Minghella knows how to make the flesh creep, but his adolescent taste in humour takes away a lot of the pain.

Samantha Lake (Elisabeth Moss) is an actress desperately trying to invigorate a career that stalled after the end of the television series which briefly made her famous.

Her agents are

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