YOU CAN ALSO READ THE ARROW’S REVIEW HERE
PLOT: Genetic engineers Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) haven’t seen enough horror movies. Thumbing their nose at the law (not to mention the laws of science), they splice together human and animal DNA, which naturally results in an astonishing creature. Tame at first, the monster of science soon represents a threat to the couple’s relationship and sanity… and a whole lot more.
REVIEW: It’s not difficult to see why Joel Silver and Dark Castle think SPLICE has potential. Although an independent effort, it sports the shiny, stylized sheen of a studio project (indeed, it shares more than a few similarities with last summer’s modest hit for the company, ORPHAN). Its ideas might get a little creepy, and audiences looking for an unusual, hoot-worthy horror film will have to brave an initially scare-less movie to get to the good stuff, but when it comes, it delivers.
As you probably know by now, SPLICE is like a slightly artier SPECIES. Both tell the tale of a young woman who is created in a lab by speculative humans who are either too arrogant or clinical to see that the poor lass doesn’t understand her situation or herself. Sure, she’s fun to look at and play child’s games with, but eventually the young lady is going to be swayed by those special young lady-feelings, and that’s when you’ve got a problem to worry about. Any parent will vouch for this.
SPLICE begins with two rock star scientists (love that idea) who are determined to prove they can do anything, and they have the clout and confidence to back up that ambition (they even appear on the cover of Wired magazine). Working for a large pharmaceutical company, the latest success for the couple are a couple of strange amorphous blobs hatched from a number of different animal genes. These blobs, nicknamed “Fred” and “Ginger”, represent a variety of financial and laudatory windfalls for the team and the conglomerate that sponsors them. But Clive (Brody) and Elsa (Polley) aren’t content to rest on their laurels, they’re on to the next step: throwing some good ol’ human DNA into the mix. What’s the worst that could happen? (Actually a line from the movie, which cheekily knows how cliche it is.)
Eventually, their experiment results in a weird, clucking little creature that clumsily, and adorably, hops around and makes a mess of things. However, it soon grows (the creatures in these movies always seem to have a staggeringly rapid developmental stage) into a small child – for lack of a better word. Named “Dren” (which is “nerd” spelled backwards, ha ha), she displays a remarkably advanced learning ability, as well as a healthy curiosity (spying on the folks while they make love is healthy, right?). Before you know it, it’s time to hustle the young lady out of the lab and into Elsa’s spooky cabin in the woods and watch her morph into a teenager (played with sprite-like naïveté by Delphine Chanéac) while wrestling with the basic question of what the hell to do with her? For the two adoptive parental figures, the answer to that question is morbidly different.
Director Vincenzo Natali has a lot of fun with this, the old FRANKENSTEIN tale. He doesn’t run away from his inspiration; after all, his characters’ names are Elsa (as in Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein) and Clive (Colin Clive, Dr. Victor Frankenstein). What’s more interesting is what he does with the characters; it’s on those terms that make Natali’s vision startling and original. For most of its running time, SPLICE plays like the weirdest tale of family dysfunction you ever saw. Dealing with themes of maternal instinct, abandonment, puberty and parental responsibility, it’s these deeper elements that give the film’s off-the-wall 3rd act the emotional heft it needs to avoid becoming just a sordid freakshow. Things do get sordid though, and the more conservative audience isn’t likely to go along for whole ride. But fans of the bizarre will have themselves a damn good time, especially when shit hits the fan, because Dren turns out to be the most frightening creature I’ve seen in years.
7.5/10
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