Chris Kavan's Movie Review of Splice

Splice Up Your Life
Chris Kavan - wrote on 06/06/10

Splice is a big jumble of genres: horror, sci-fi, drama, dark comedy - it owes a lot of Frankenstein - and those "horror of pregnancy" scare fims they used to show in schools.

Genetic engineers Clive and Elsa are rock stars after getting "Fred and Ginger" - amorphous blob-creatures to create a protein that will make their pharmaceutical company very rich. When they mention they would like to take things to the next level, by introducing human genes, they are shut down.

Of course they defy orders and create their own human hybrid creation - Dren starts off as a kind of bird / scorpion / female and slowly is revealed to have gills and wings and other surprises in store for the unsuspecting parents. Clive and Elsa at first keep it in an unused room at the lab before moving it to storage, but after a disastrous presentation threatens their entire operation, they move their creation to a farmhouse.

You can probably guess where things are going when Clive learns that Elsa used her own genetic material in Dren. Treating Dren like an ordinary girl - makeup, dancing, pets - is only begging for disaster, and, of course, that's where it all leads in the end.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley make for a nice pair of neurotic scientists / damaged parents. Brody never stands up for himself, doing just about everything Elsa says, and Elsa herself comes from a less-than-cheerful childhood, which manifests itself in her treatment of Dren. Needless to say, these faults only make the situation with Dren that much worse.

Speaking of Dren, despite not speaking, Delphine Chanéac does an outstanding job as the adult Dren. Simply using expression and movement, she creates a classic character. She's smarter and more manipulative than one would know at first glance, and all her spliced traits just make her that much more dangerous.

While I think the end is a bit over the top, for most of the rest of the film Splice keeps up the pace and tension. It's less "Science gone mad" and more "parenting gone bad". These people shouldn't be allowed to have a dog, much less a human-animal hybrid. It's cold, but I think they got exactly what they deserved in the end.