Splice

Synopsis: Clive (Adrian Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are biotech researchers. They’ve just created Fred and Ginger, two worm-like creatures made by splicing together different animal DNA strands. Fred and Ginger produce various secretions they can use to make medicines and other patentable products. They want to take their research to the next level, to include human DNA, but are forbidden to do so. So they do it anyway. What’s the worst that could happen..?

I like Vincenzo Natali's work. Cube was a great little film, Cypher was a lot of fun, and you have to see Nothing, a surreal comedy about solipsism. Splice is his latest film, and with a bigger budget than usual, he's delivered a fun little monster movie. Told no, but doing it anyhow, Clive and Elsa create a weird little creature they name Dren (spell it backwards...). Dren (played by Delphine Chaneac) rapidly grows up into a strange and oddly beautiful young woman assuming of course that you find a girl with multi-jointed legs and a tail with a venomous stinger at the end attractive. What follows is closer to Cronenberg's The Fly than your standard monster movie with a healthy dose of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein thrown in as well. There aren’t the traditional scares, but rather a growing awareness that what they’ve created is dangerous and unstable, especially as Dren becomes more and more fascinated with Clive.

Despite it being marketed as a science fiction horror movie, Splice is more of a dramatic chamber piece, a kind of screwed-up family drama. As we learn more about Clive and Elsa’s slowly disintegrating marriage and Elsa’s traumatic childhood, the tension mounts around the creation and the concealment of Dren. Clive wanted children, Elsa didn’t. But then Dren comes along and Elsa’s maternal instincts kick in. But that turns nasty when she realizes Dren likes Clive more than her. The push and pull between Clive and Elsa for the love of their weird and dangerous child creates some perverse and nasty scenes, and the horror is found in the inversions and contortions of the traditional family dynamic rather than cheap frights. There’s more than a little Cronenberg DNA to be found in this film.

For most of the running time, it’s a fast and bizarre ride, and only near the end does it creakily shift into a traditional monster movie mode. It’s almost as if someone tapped the filmmakers on the shoulder and reminded them they’d been hired to make a horror movie. But even then, Splice manages to take its ideas into some very dark and messed up areas. As the credits begin to roll, the implications of previous scenes make for a very disturbing perspective on both Elsa’s views on motherhood and the triangle of Dren, Clive and Elsa.

Splice won't set your world on fire, but it's a really enjoyable film with some great performances, cool effects and some perverse and surprising twists in its tail.

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