Splice
Melbourne International Film Festival, 01/08/2010
Status: Behind by 16 films
I’ve said before that I love a director that turns a formula or a genre on its head. Splice has forced me to add a caveat: I like when a director turns a formula or genre on its head successfully. That’s probably a cop out, but on paper, Splice should tick all the boxes for me. In practice it was less than great.
ADRIEN BRODY (Predators, The Pianist) and SARAH POLLEY (My Life Without Me, Dawn of the Dead) are geneticists working in a commercial lab on a lucrative animal gene-splicing project. They push the boundaries of ethics (though not really of science) and create a human/animal hybrid, named Dren. I’m not sure what genes they used, but Dren has all kinds animal and alien-looking bits and pieces going on. Growing and learning at an accelerated rate, Dren is at first like a child to them, before becoming full-grown and very, very deadly.
Splice is part family drama, part rogue-scientist-messing-with-nature, part monster movie. There are lots of interesting elements, but it turns out - much like Dren - to be not quite the same as any of its constituent parts but an odd, uncomfortable (and once or twice horrible) mixture.
The brilliance of writer-director VINCENZO NATALI’s 1997 debut film Cube was the simplicity of the premise. Splice gets tangled up in all the things it wants to say and be so ends up saying little and being weird. Although it turns the formula on its head, it doesn’t do so terribly successfully.
