‘If you could understand crazy, it wouldn’t be crazy...’
When will people learn? If you try to create life artificially, you will end up developing feelings for that lifeform, probably having sex with it and almost certainly being murdered by it. Splice is yet another cautionary tale within the man vs creation subgenre, and while it features an animal/human hybrid with wings and a tail, Adrien Brody is by far the weirdest thing in this movie…
Clive Nicoli (Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley), a pair of unscrupulous genetic engineers, defy their similarly unscrupulous bosses to splice animal and human DNA to create Dren (Delphine Chaneac), an initially prepubescent female creature thing that eventually, erm… blossoms into something else entirely.
So, yeah. Adrien Brody. What an odd man. He seems to only ever appear in the most prestigious Oscar fare imaginable or utter B-movie schlock. Or Wes Anderson movies. His haircut in this film is, quite frankly, preposterous. He shares absolutely zero chemistry with Polley to the extent that it feels like they are not only appearing in different films but also existing on different planes of reality. They aren’t delivering bad performances in isolation; in fact, Polley, as ever, is pretty great. It’s just that their performances, like a stopped clock, only occasionally intersect with anything approaching reality or with each other.
Anyway. Writer-director Vincenzo Natali rose to prominence with his vastly underrated and underseen horror/sci-fi classic Cube – a film that preceded and foreshadowed the Saw franchise and the concept of an escape room by several years, but unfortunately, Splice never comes close to hitting the giddy heights of that film. Instead, it takes some familiar tropes and takes them to new, weird places. There are moments in this film that are genuinely uncomfortable. One scene in particular will be burned into my unsuspecting retinas for weeks to come, no doubt. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know what I mean.
Splice is a new take on a tired concept. It’s a weird film, but not weird enough to be truly distinctive and therefore not weird enough to recommend it. Watch Ex Machina instead.
