Splice is about a science couple, Elsa and Clive, who decide that it would be cool to splice animal with human DNA with predictably disastrous results. It stars the Adrien Brody that I once thought was talented and hot, but in retrospect peaked then just continuously made bad movies and Sarah Polley, who is the best asset of this film and is actually an accomplished documentarian. Guillermo del Toro was an executive producer so that will explain some of the plot twists. The director stopped making feature films thereafter and went on to a healthy career in television series.
Half the fun of movies is watching people do stupid things and feel superior for the run time, but they also have to be smart enough to not immediately hate the characters and not wish them ill immediately. I would love if some actual enterprising scientist, preferably a bioengineer, just critiqued the accuracy of sci fi films. I could not find one, and if you do, please send it my way. I could never get into the movie because this scientist couple allegedly had a benevolent reason for being mad scientists—harvesting proteins that could stop disease, but I never quite bought it and felt that even though I was not a scientist, I could do a better job of creating a plausible reason why combining species is necessary as opposed to just taking the protein from the original species. The majority of the film is more concerned about their aesthetic—they wear cool clothes, listen to rock and jazz, appear on the cover of magazines and have edgy haircuts. The superficial is a substitute for character development that is left largely to the actors to create.
Aesthetically Splice aged poorly. The transition from the lab to the urban landscape to the countryside to regular interiors is jarring. The initial look of the lab looked as if it inspired The School Nurse Films with a mix of bubblegum pinks and baby boy blues, a look that I don’t like, then the majority of the rest of the film is so comparatively flat and dull that it takes awhile to accept that is actually the dominant tone of the film.
I love horror and sci fi. Splice tries to make the point that if you break the laws of God and man basically everything will devolve into chaos. It is a pretty standard mad scientist trope, but the real horror of the film, and I am uncertain if the filmmakers completely and consciously embraced it because it was well developed on Elsa’s side, but not Clive or Brody never got on the same page as Polley, was how unresolved childhood abuse affects adult relationships, especially when a couple is at a turning point and decides to have a child. The science experiment is really a metaphor for parenting, and it is genuinely horrifying to watch Elsa and Clive devolve from a happy couple to individuals unconsciously recreating childhood traumas and becoming their parents or their anti-selves with their creation. The most genuinely horrible moment in the film is one hour eleven minutes into the film when we find out one of the shadow reasons why Elsa may have become a scientist in the first place. I loved how the film really let her become the horrible mother.
I cannot recommend Splice because while the concept is genuinely disturbing, it is mostly poorly executed so you may only get a hot fifteen minutes, and I am being generous, of visceral horror. Clive’s horrible father is an underdeveloped concept that is all potential, no delivery, because he gets to have a sibling to interact with. If Elsa’s childhood has seeped into the way that she interacts with their experiment, then Clive’s childhood should too. We are human beings, and we crave symmetry and patterns so what is the movie saying intentionally or not, about Clive’s history and his desire to be dominated by horrible women? Given what happens between him and their creation, are we learning about the nature of his childhood abuse or is this another movie simply trying to push boundaries in the vein of lame nineties sci-fi horror like the Species franchise? Because I suspect that it is more the latter, the impulse to get as close to soft core porn as possible without getting a rating that would lose butts in the theaters.
Why do I think that Splice is more Species? I have the benefit of hindsight with The Shape of Water, but the casting of their creature, Dren, who visually looks half human and half kangaroo was a dead giveaway. If you have an actor playing an unusual creature, that actor does not have to be hot unless one of the primary functions of that creature is sexual. It is the Natasha Henstridge rule, which is in full effect in this movie. Even though a grown ass woman plays Dren as an adolescent, the movie never alters Dren’s voice from the childhood trill which tugs our heart strings. It is the most unintentionally funny and ridiculous sights in film to see three adults try to pretend that one of them is their daughter figure. The filmmakers unwittingly betray their sexual fetishes in their creation of the creature-a woman’s body and a kid’s voice. (I recently saw Siren, and the supernatural being in that film, though they had less money, was way better conceived anatomically including when she is taking her body out for a spin.)
Splice’s filmmakers only see Dren in terms of sexuality and gender, but at a time when conflating the two was instinctually instead of distinguishing them. The gender norms promulgated in this movie are wild. Girls are supposed to be one way, and boys are another. Basically men are instinctually homicidal maniacs who want to fuck anything resembling a woman from their species. Instead of exploring the most textured aspect of the story, child abuse, the true trajectory of the film is about reasserting gender norms, particularly in terms of the couple’s relationship. Elsa is on top, and Clive is on the bottom when they have sex. The movie wants to literally put Elsa in her place, and they get there with a combo of Carrie and Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill shot outs with an Oedipal climax. Deviating from gender norms is monstrous and an abomination. With a better developed abuse narrative, the ending could have been less prurient and more clearly about revenge for the sexual violence that the parents inflicted on their creation.
If there is a list of transphobic films with Dressed to Kill being the best then Splice is the worst with a healthy dose of incest. I know that the filmmakers were just looking for an excuse to have an onscreen threesome, but maybe next time, just have an onscreen threesome. TERFs with delusions of transwomen raping them can blame this film for their fears. Please people, be better than a bunch of filmmakers looking for an excuse to have a bunch of hot actors have simulate sex on screen. This film could have been what people rave that The Babadook was, but instead it sets its sights low then sunk beneath the floor. Next time let Polley take the helm. Her movie would have been a knockout.
