Splice
Only some badly handled crucial scenes mar an otherwise superb and fiendishly enjoyable science fiction movie.
For the first half of Cube director Vincenzo Natali's latest sci-fi film, the viewer is on a good-natured b-movie flick, with exceptional effects to elevate it. However, Natali begins to push the boundaries, and while there is much to admire in such daring amongst a popcorn-munching gross-out, the tone is all wrong.
Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are Clive and Elsa, gifted genetic engineers who specialise in splicing different animals' DNA together for medicinal purposes. However, their dream is to go further, to create a human/animal hybrid. And when they do, in secret, the resulting chimera is volatile and unpredictable.
Their creation is initially fascinating: a bird-like, barely-formed baby, both grotesque and beautiful. The effects are seamless, and it would've been so easy for any hybrid creation to have verged on the laughable, but this creature is stunningly realised. This fledging ages rapidly, and the newly named Dren ends up in the form of Delphine Chanéac, in a brave and nuanced performance. Chanéac's beauty is manipulated subtly - the ostrich-like legs, and alien-esque eyes - and she retains that childish naïveté and burgeoning sexual awakening that Natali requires for the story. Having Dren grow from a baby chicken to a bald, yet utterly feminine being that looks like she's just stepped off the catwalk is asking for trouble, and trouble is what Natali delivers in spades.
But Natali's execution of Dren's dangerous power is handled in the most uncomfortable way. An unsubtle Freudian exploration of sexuality, Natali is successful in making the viewer uneasy, and although it is clumsily handled, the repulsion is long-lasting. There have been comparisons with the disturbing nature of David Cronenberg's work, but Natali makes the mistake of allowing too much tenderness and sensuality to pervade, which only leads to disgust at the creator and all involved - not the characters themselves. This crucial moment is where the film pivots and becomes a vessel for dreadful misogyny; women are depicted as either vindictive, predatory or manipulative, before getting their comeuppance in a vile way that jars heavily with the scene referenced earlier in this paragraph (this is a particularly hard film to review without spoilers).
Polley is the stand-out performance, bringing sympathy to a controlling, overly ambitious woman, coping well with some of Elsa's least likeable character traits. Brody flounders passively around her, but his role as a gifted scientist is at least believable, if his subsequent actions aren't. The stars in Splice are the tremendous special effects, some wonderfully macabre experiments that shouldn't be dismissed as side-plots, and its great ambition. Only some badly handled crucial scenes mar an otherwise superb and fiendishly enjoyable science fiction movie.
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