Splice DVD
Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac, Brandon McGibbon
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Rating: 3/5
The potential awful consequences of meddling with nature haven’t been seen on the big screen for quite some time but director Vincenzo Natali puts that right with his new movie Splice.
Clive and Elsa are superstars of the genetic engineering world. They specialise in splicing together DNA from different animals to create fantastical new hybrids.
The charismatic couple wants to use human DNA in a new hybrid – something that could yield astronomical medical benefits.
The pharmaceutical company that funds their research, however, is more interested in exploiting their earlier triumphs for easier, short-term profit.
Clive and Elsa secretly conduct their own experiment. The result is Dren: an amazing creature who exhibits an array of unexpected developments, both physical and intellectual.
Dren exceeds their wildest dreams... and, ultimately, their most terrifying nightmare.
It’s fair to say that Splice is unlike any movie that you will have seen this year and the film really does start off well before descending into a slightly over the top horror movie.
The creating a new form of life movie has been done so many times before and the beginning of the film sees it try to be not the film that you were expecting.
There are a lot of moral questions raised at the beginning as Elsa and Clive want to expand their genetic engineering research by using human DNA - and you can imagine what the reaction was to that.
So on the quiet the pair goes ahead with their research opening a while can of worms in relation to the scientific implications as well as moral ones.
Then the movie very much becomes about parents raising a child as Dren begins to grow and Clive, and in particularly Elsa, bond with their ‘child’.
There are great central performances from Brody, who is the more reluctant party about the experiment, and Polley who is haunted by her own troublesome childhood.
And it’s these character flaws that inform their decisions and take them down the rather unsettling road that they find themselves upon.
However while the first half of the movie is filled with tension of their research being discovered and them trying to understand this new form of life all that disappears in the second half as it turns into a movie that we have come to expect from this genre.
Sadly it descends into rather an uncomfortable horror movie as it turns from a tale of genetic engineering to a monster freak show.
And while this movie is flawed it is never boring it’s a very daring piece of work from the filmmaker that has some very interesting ideas and concepts.
There is no doubt that this is a very original movie, that does have a very interesting closing scene, but the final execution of the film doesn’t quite work and that is a major shame.
Splice is out on DVD now.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw