The two recognizable stars of Splice, a pleasurably shivery, sometimes delightfully icky horror movie about love and monsters in the age of genetic engineering, are Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, a well-matched pair of earthbound oddities. Given their respective performative idiosyncrasies and, as important, their singularly nontraditional beauty, the pair’s casting immediately signals that the director Vincenzo Natali is after something different. With Polley and Brody on board, there’s a chance that despite the big-studio brands on the movie, you’re not headed into genre purgatory with the usual disposable plastic people who often populate (and perish in) mainstream horror. When these two bleed, you might actually care.
That’s a good thing, and it helps explain how Splice delivers for the horror movie fan who has grown weary of being suckered by films that promise new frights only to deliver the same old buckets of gore and guts. Polley and Brody play Clive and Elsa, live-in lovers and rock-star bio-engineers (they’re on the cover of Wired), who are creating new organisms from the DNA of different animals. The money bankrolling them comes from a pharmaceutical outfit, one of those shady corporations that occasionally foot the bill in movies of this sort. Such is the case in The Fly, David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, another cautionary tale about genetic mayhem that Natali appears to have absorbed into his own aesthetic DNA.
The Cronenberg influence here is evident in Natali’s interest in the body and birth and in an initially subdued, near-narcoleptic atmosphere that helps build a nice sense of foreboding. Splice opens with Clive and Elsa ushering their latest entity into the world, an event partly shot from the newborn’s point of view. “He’s so cute,” Elsa says, beaming. The he is a writhing, vaguely penile blob, Fred, which is soon introduced to a second blob, Ginger. (Natali, who wrote the script with Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, likes his allusions: Clive is most likely a homage to Colin Clive, who played Dr Frankenstein in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, with Elsa Lanchester as the memorably shocked betrothed.)
Although Fred’s point-of-view shot might seem like a throwaway, it’s fundamental to Natali’s design. Point-of-view shots don’t necessarily put you in a character’s (in this case, metaphoric) shoes, but because they let you see what a character sees, allowing you to share his or her perspective, they can create a sense of empathy for the character. In this case, though, empathy with Fred seems less the point than what it is we see through his eyes: Clive and Elsa, fully masked and dressed in laboratory clothes, working in the slightly sickly greenish light of a laboratory bought and paid for by a big company playing at God. This is the vision of Clive and Elsa that Natali wants you to remember, despite all that comes next.
And my, what a lot of unnerving fun comes next, including a spectacular splash of blood, a fall from grace, some true relationship talk and an impulsive, cataclysmically wrongheaded decision. Fred and Ginger, alas, make an abrupt exit, leaving Clive and Elsa close to losing their funds. Inspiration strikes, and a new creature is born, a real doozy that’s initially christened H-50 and, after some growing pains (for everyone), Dren. A sensational, vividly realistic being, Dren is a seamless amalgam of computer-generated effects, mechanical effects and human performance — played as a child by Abigail Chu and as an adult by Delphine Chaneac — that scuttles, slithers and vaults into the horror cinema annals. A mutant is born.
Natali handles Dren’s eerie entrance into the world with near-flawless timing and a thickening air of dread. Working with Robert Munroe (the visual-effects supervisor) and Howard Berger (special makeup and creature effects), Natali has fashioned a creature that, with her tail, skinned-chicken legs and cleft head alternately looks as harmless as a bunny and like something that might leap out from Ridley Scott’s Alien (or, scarier yet, a David Lynch film). Still, for Elsa, Dren is no mere experiment: She’s a test-tube baby, one that comes with the emotional and psychological weight of an in-utero conception. And the bigger Dren gets — she soon grows arms that hug Elsa tight — the deeper the bond between the two and the greater the trouble for Elsa and Clive.
Watching Dren develop — from newt to child to va-va-va-voom adult — you understand why Splice attracted the support of the director Guillermo del Toro, one of its seven executive producers. Natali, whose earlier films include Cube, hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics. The shivers might often outweigh the scares, and Natali loses his way in the last half-hour. Yet working with actors who make you care and a neo-Frankenstein creation that touchingly does, too, he has become one of the genre’s new great fright hopes.
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