Review: Splice

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Run Time: 107 minutes

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley

Splice follows two young and revolutionary scientists, Clive (played by Brody) and Elsa (Polley), who work in a genetics lab that “splices” together strands of DNA from different species to create creatures that have the potential to produce disease-curing proteins. After learning that their program is set to be shut down, the pair decides to take the program into her own hands and create a scientific first: a hybrid human-animal that possesses the best and worst qualities of each species found in its DNA. Their plan to abort the creature before it comes full term becomes impossible and Elsa insists that raise the creature, named Dren, as if she were her own child. Dren grows at an accelerated rate and is extremely intelligent, and though she can read and spell, does not possess the capability for speech.

The skittish Dren eventually has to be moved out to Elsa’s mother’s abandoned farm, but Elsa is uncomfortable with the idea of anything that has to do with her mother. Once there, Dren continues to prove to be a genetic wonder, sprouting wings and showing of a poisonous stinger in her tail, but she also seduces Clive, and midway through the act, Elsa walks in. This event proves to be a turning point after which Dren becomes more violent and escapes out into the woods. Clive and Elsa, along with Clive’s brother and the program director, set out into the woods to find her, but like the spliced species before her, Dren has changed sex overnight and become and extremely aggressive male. The final scenes in the film are of a violent showdown between the couple and the monster they have created.

Though the story line sounds intriguing at first glance, the many sub-plots that are not played out make it frustrating to watch. Much time is spent in the opening scenes showing that Elsa does not like her mother and when the pair end up in her mother’s old farmhouse, she shows Clive her tiny, dirty, sparse bedroom, implying that her mother was abusive. Throughout the film, she gazes at a picture of her mother and her when she was a child, but the audience never learns exactly what happened between them. In another scene, Dren has layed stuffed animals under a blanket in her bed to make it look like she’s asleep there, followed by a cut to where her stinger poised over Clive’s head as if she were about to kill him, but she abruptly falls ill and “dies”. These undeveloped but still present storylines, combined with continuity errors (we see a close-up of Clive waking up in his pajamas on the couch in the barn, then cut to him walking back into the barn dressed in a parka) undercut the real storyline. With some re-editing and either the fleshing out of the sub plot (in the case of Elsa’s love-hate relationship with motherhood) or eliminating it completely (the scene with Dren’s stuffed animals and stinger), the movie would make a lot more sense and have a tighter plot.

Another reason the film is hard to watch is the implausibility of parts of the story. Clive and Elsa frequently note, via their tape recorder, that the next creature they create needs to have fewer human features, but they tell their project manager in the beginning of the film that they can pick and choose exactly which genes and characteristics go into each splice. It is clear early on that the spliced creatures change gender mid-way through their life cycle and become extremely vicious, but Clive and Elsa seemed surprised when Dren changes and tries to kill them. I feel that much of these inconsistencies could be fixed through more editing, but some aspects of the film can’t be.

The harsh way in which Sarah Polley’s Elsa is lit with fluorescent lights from a low angle her washed-out costumes already makes it difficult for the viewer to like her. It doesn’t help that her idea of acting is raising her eyebrows and doing a lot of stomping around. More than anything, she is overly dramatic in her delivery, as if every line were the most controversial and important one in the script, leaving Brody to jumpstart the dialogue after almost every time she speaks. And Brody does a relatively good job of just that, though the viewer can sense at times that he is annoyed with his costar. His character stands in stark contrast to Polley’s with darker clothes and a more rational mindset. In watching the film, the audience discovers that we are not meant to like Elsa, and the viewer, like Elsa’s mother, struggles with the idea of whether she is good or evil. In the end, it seems she is lonely, and has created Dren so she can play mother and child, dressing her up and cuddling her when she’s scared.

The high stakes in this thriller are what make some of the characters’ crazy actions plausible, and dealing with billions of dollars and breakthrough cures could understandably send anybody over the edge. Unfortunately, overacting highlights the holes in the story and frustrates the viewer, but with some re-editing, loose ends could be tied down to create a better-flowing plot. Though I don’t believe that this should be the finished product, the film is undoubtedly scary in parts, and its ironic use of soundtrack in the credits gives it an eerie tone. The ethical issues of cloning and “playing god” are explored thoroughly through Elsa’s struggle to remain objective in what was originally a small experiment. It is because we don’t connect with or like her that we can see where the pair went wrong.