“He’s so cute!” exclaims Sarah Polley in the opening scene of Splice. But cute is relative when you’re a scientist working at the cutting edge of genetic manipulation — the newborn creature Polley is cooing over is a writhing, tonguelike sac, apparently part caterpillar and part butcher-shop-window cow’s tongue — that recalls the monster Geena Davis imagines herself giving birth to in David Cronenberg’s The Fly.I’m sure director/co-writer Vincenzo Natali was aiming for a Cronenbergian mix of visceral shocks and cerebral themes with Splice, but instead he’s wound up making something that suggests what Species would have been like if it took itself way too seriously. But instead of Natasha Henstridge’s sexually insatiable alien-human hybrid, the creature at the centre of Splice is a mixture of earth creatures (frogs, snakes, insects) with a splash of human DNA to make it interesting. “Dren,” as Polley and her husband and lab partner Adrien Brody call it, quickly grows from a two-legged albino salamanderish thing into a humanoid female with a nasty little stinger on the end of her tail and a face that suggests Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis crossed with the picture of Björk on the cover of Homogenic. (Dren is played as an adult by Delphine Chanéac, who gives an overthought, check-out-my-modern-dance-training performance.) At first, Polley and Brody treat Dren partly as a lab specimen and partly as a daughter, all the while hiding her from the scientists and the executives at the pharmaceutical conglomerate that employs them. But Dren doesn’t remain docile for long — her accelerated life cycle means she hits her rebellious teenage phase when she’s only a month old. And when she acts out, her plans are much more worrisome than simply getting a tattoo on her ankle.
The plot of Splice seems as poorly thought-through as Polley and Brody’s experiment. You get the feeling that Natali knew that, for practical plot purposes, the movie would have to take place within a high-tech biotech company — it’s the only place where something like Dren could possibly be created — and then chose to ignore the fact that this setting makes everything else that happens in the script completely implausible. It’s ridiculous to think that Polley and Brody could keep Dren’s existence a secret for as long as they do, or then ship her to an abandoned barn on the farm where Polley grew up. (It’s also never explained how this poor farm girl, who apparently was the victim of relentless abuse as a child, became a world-class geneticist by the age of 35.
Maybe this is as good a place as any to note that Splice has maybe the most obnoxious costume designs of any film I’ve seen this year —Adrien Brody’s ensembles of checked pants, vests, novelty t-shirts, and fur-trimmed parkas are truly an eyesore, as are Polley’s chunky shoes and designer jackets. (The filmmakers apparently decided at some point that famous genetic scientists all dress like bicycle couriers with side gigs as DJs.) Is this making too much of a small thing? I know I’m supposed to find the fact that Brody and Polley’s characters are named Clive and Elsa, after Bride of Frankenstein stars Colin Clive and Elsa Lanchester, cute, but I just thought it was gratingly cute. Same with naming their lab facility NERD or their artificial womb BETI, after the pin-up girl.
Not to use another film as a club with which to beat up on Splice, but here’s the thing: I just can’t help but recall how in The Fly, David Cronenberg grounded his wild story in a world that had such an effortless air of reality to it. There were so many great, believable little touches in that movie, from Jeff Goldblum’s closet of identical suits to Geena Davis’ nicely drawn relationship with her editor and former lover. Splice never achieves this effect — late in the film, for instance, Brody and Polley have a scene where they have to talk through a shocking act that one of them has committed, and you can tell that Natali really has no idea how to write this scene. This couple is dealing with a crazy, insane problem that no married couple in history has ever had to deal with, but instead Natali gives us the kind of generic marital argument we’ve seen in countless other movies.
Splice goes to some weird, kinky places in its final half-hour, but I would argue it needed to be even more daring and explicit. I would have liked to have seen fewer scenes of Polley and Brody arguing over the ethics of genetic manipulation (yawn), and more sick-funny-disturbing scenes of them raising their mutant daughter together, thinking of themselves as loving, liberal parents even as they commit what are essentially multiple acts of child abuse just to keep her under control.
That wouldn’t be a very commercial movie, I realize, but it might be more focussed and interestingly complicated than Splice, whose message basically boils down to “Don’t meddle with nature.” And “Never trust a girl with a tail.” But doesn’t everybody know all that already?
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