TIFF 2024: Shell, Mistress Dispeller, Vice is Broke

You have to feel at least a little bit bad for “Shell,” purely based on timing; this is a mash-up of Hollywood satire and body horror, an exploration of the impossible standards of youth and beauty impressed upon women in general but on actresses in particular. It’s hitting the festival circuit riiiiiiiiiight behind the oxygen-sucking “The Substance.” Perhaps this one will scratch the itch of those intrigued by that film’s themes but repelled by its excesses.

The director is Max Minghella, whose previous effort behind the camera was the fairly earnest rise-to-fame musical drama “Teen Spirit.” Still, he giddily embraces the opportunity to make a proper genre movie, reveling in the gross-out ephemera, staging a splashy blood-on-the-wall climax, and winking at the traditional tropes. Elisabeth Moss puts it all out there in the leading role, working up a sparky chemistry with Kate Hudson in the picture’s Goop Gwyneth role (she’s having a blast slipping from bland lean-in bromides to smiling menace). The entertainment business satire elements hit the mark, the twists are solid, and Minghella harnesses a creeping sense of spiraling dread with real skill.

“Mistress Dispeller” takes its title from a real profession in China; the job of a mistress dispeller is to intercede in a marriage where one partner is unfaithful to try to restore and repair the couple. Director Elizabeth Lo begins with a disclaimer that all parties agreed to participate in this documentary at the beginning and end. That distinction is important—it’s easy to imagine this as a series of cheap shots, some kind of Bravo reality show in the making. Still, Lo is ultimately empathetic to everyone involved, seeing each as a victim of their own loneliness and heartache.

It doesn’t all work (she takes some brief but peculiar detours, which may work thematically but not so much at the moment), but there are moments of real tenderness and pathos here. The eventual face-to-face between wife and mistress is astonishing in what’s not said, what is said, and how it’s said.

Early in his documentary “Vice is Broke,” director/producer/narrator/protagonist Eddie Huang says of the 2023 bankruptcy of the Vice Media empire, “I’m sure there’ll be an Alex Gibney-esque documentary with talking heads sitting on stools, cutting the story into bite-sized pieces for mouth-breathers, like this was WeWork or Enron.” It’s a moment true to the Vice playbook: calling out a standard-bearer of legacy media to assure your hipper-than-thou audience that you’re gonna give them the real, raw, uncut punk version. 

But what Huang cooks up is no better—a wildly unfocused ramble that mixes personal anecdotes (debate proximity to subject all you want, but I’m not sure any documentary should include its director uttering the phrase “I was in a hot tub with him once”), personal complaints (we get way into the weeds about the money the company still owes Huang), and skin-deep analysis, all rendered in the Vice News first-person style that Huang himself mocks early in the proceedings. Why is he arm-wrestling Gavin McInnes? Why is he taking David Choe to a palm reader? Why is he doing an interview in Guy Fieri drag? Vice’s rise and fall story is compelling and could be told in a fine documentary, free of this one’s irritating sense of posturing and grievance. Maybe someone should give Alex Gibney a ring.