Elisabeth Moss, Max Minghella Film ‘Shell’ Is a “True Popcorn Movie” 

Take Elisabeth Moss as a down-on-her-luck actress and Kate Hudson as the ultra-glamorous CEO of a wellness company who may be protecting a monstrous secret and have them trade zingy one-liners. Add in a long-haired henchman. Top it up with throwback energy courtesy of the likes of Kaia Gerber (Saturday Night, Palm Royale), Arian Moayed (Succession), Este Haim (Licorice Pizza), and Elizabeth Berkley (Showgirls, Saved by the Bell). And then have director Max Minghella mix it all up into a 100-minute self-aware genre and genre-bending mashup of the scary, the thrilling, the funny, and the wild. What you get is Shell, which has its world premiere in the Special Presentations lineup of the Toronto Film Festival.

Described as a “dark comedy and body horror about society’s obsession with youth and good looks,” Moss and Minghella hope his second feature as a director will be a rollercoaster of a joyride for audiences. “One of the goals of Max and I was just to make something that was entertaining, to make something fun,” the star tells THR during a brief break from her work on the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale in Toronto. “People need a little bit of a break sometimes and just want to go to the movies and be entertained. But it’s really well-made entertainment.”

The director echoes that. “I was quite excited to make something that was audience-facing and a true popcorn movie,” Minghella tells THR, sharing that his mother used to tell him bedtime stories consisting of the plot of films she had seen in her work for the British Board of Film Classification. “It was a period of time when they were making a very specific kind of movie,” he says. “So this film is a love letter to that period of studio filmmaking.”

Both creatives, who have been playing opposite each other in Handmaid’s Tale for years, enjoyed the change in work dynamics on Shell. “We’re so used to collaborating, because on Handmaid’s Tale, even if I’m the director and the executive producer, it feels very collaborative,” Moss shares. “We’re used to talking about scenes and script and shots.” With Minghella ultimately in charge on Shell, “there definitely was a lot of trust there,” she adds. “And he gave me just a lot of confidence in trying different things. I could go outside my box a little bit. We really just transitioned into this different relationship so easily.”

Minghella feels the experience was “very energizing for both of us,” calling Moss and her “innate” talent “a dream for a filmmaker.” He also highlights: “We had an incredibly challenging schedule for this film, and she was able to deliver these extraordinary performances so quickly and with such precision.”

Both gush about the lineup of other names appearing in Shell, with Moss speaking of “a murderers’ row” of talent. “Getting to work with Kate [Hudson] was so cool. She’s somebody that I’ve admired for so many years,” she explains, lauding her co-star for her “really nuanced and deeply funny, but also deeply complicated and interesting” performance. “There was a way to play it that would have been super camp and super expected.”

Meanwhile, Gerber “has got talent coming out of her ears,” Moss tells THR, saying it “was really cool to stand opposite somebody who is exploring this other part of her skill set and is crushing it.”

Plus, there were all these other names. “I am a producer on the movie, and sometimes I would show up and be like, ‘How did you get so and so?!’ I think it was just this script and working with Max and everything. It’s, ‘Come for the people on the poster, but then you are surprised by 20 people that you didn’t realize were going to be in the movie’.”

Shell showcases a lighter side of her that is “different from things I’ve been doing lately,” Moss acknowledges. “The closest I got to it recently was working with Ruben Östlund on The Square.” But she says she never really picks projects simply to do something new. “I am just attracted to what the material is, and I just thought this script was so unique,” she explains. “I think it ended up being a lot funnier than we thought it was going to be. That was really fun, because obviously, Max’s and my day job isn’t necessarily comedy of the year.”

But the two appreciated the opportunity for Moss to come out of her comedic… well, shell. She may not even mind this bad pun on the movie title. “We are both people who really appreciate comedy, and we really appreciate that kind of film, so we laugh a lot together as friends,” Moss says. “So it was really fun to do Shell together and not have to be super serious.”

That said, the movie deals with such issues as aging and body image and expectations. “We’re still upset with anti-aging, and whatever the ideal of the body is,” Moss says. “There’s a lot more inclusivity, of course, but at the same time there’s still an idea of how you are supposed to look, and that’s often not achievable in our industry. As a woman in this business, it is not something I’m unfamiliar with.”

Her director sees the topic as one that audiences around the world can also connect with. “We all have a relationship to mortality, and we all have a relationship to our vanity, and that’s universal,” Minghella notes. “So it’s wonderful to have an access point or a theme in a story which we can all find a way into. It’s about something that affects us regardless of age, race or gender.”

Shell, produced by Range, Blank Tape, Love & Squalor, and Dark Castle Entertainment, is being sold for the U.S. by WME and CAA, as well as Black Bear for international markets.

Buyers can look forward to the director and his cast having fun playing with old movie tropes, such as the henchman or Haim’s character who “basically functions exclusively as a soundboard for the movie and sort of shows up at the most convenient moments,” he shares with THR. “And that’s very much a satire of some slightly underwritten characters” found in movies of the past that he has long enjoyed. “I love a movie called Look Who’s Talking. That was a very influential movie for me as a kid. There’s actually quite a lot of Look Who’s Talking in this film, and Lydia feels like a character from Look Who’s Talking.”

Moss and Minghella clearly see an opportunity for it for audiences nostalgic for some good old-fashioned escapism. “I don’t think there have been a lot of movies made like this recently,” she says. Minghella shares that he wanted to make Shell a film that is “maybe entertainment that has fallen a little bit out of fashion.” Calling himself a product of a different time when major studio pictures were “very character-driven and genre-driven,” the director explains. “We don’t see a huge number of those anymore, and I was really missing that. As an audience member, I was yearning to see a film like this.”