With Splice, Vincenzo Natali, director of the cult 1997 mystery Cube, has confected a bizarre, black-comic horror, a cross-breed mutant Frankenfilm with bits of Ridley Scott’s Alien, David Cronenberg’s The Fly and David Lynch’s Eraserhead.
It’s also an entertaining and cheerfully subversive satire on corporate ambition and on the consequences of suppressing one’s sex drive in favour of one’s work drive.
Natali imagines a highly profitable biotech company, in the not-too-distant future, that uneasily tolerates among its workforce a married couple to whose creative scientific genius it has given a long leash.
They are Clive and Elsa, played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, who by thinking outside the box, and by not being overly squeamish about ethical issues, have boosted the company’s performance massively and become celebrities.
New creation
They have interspliced the DNA of a number of animals, creating a new, trademarked gene-creature, the cells of which can be replicated to create a hugely cost-effective new strain of livestock feed. But they’re not stopping there.
Clive and Elsa are massively proud of the new male and female they have in their tank, whom they are now encouraging to perform a mating ritual-dance known as imprinting and whom they whimsically name Fred and Ginger.
Yet even this achievement does not slake Clive and Elsa’s thirst for transgressive creation. Working in a secret lab, and outside the law, they splice human DNA to this creature in an attempt to create breeding stock for genetic material which will cure all diseases from cancer to Parkinson’s. Inevitably, things go awry.
Canadian star Polley is a quietly potent presence in the film — more interesting, frankly, than Brody. An accomplished director herself, she was in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, as well as Hal Hartley’s intensely weird monster fantasy No Such Thing. She is an interestingly unglamorous presence to this bizarre film and her oddly girlish look of solemnity is deployed to good effect when required.
Splice is no masterpiece, but it has funny “creature effects” and make-up, forthright storytelling and a robust, deadpan insistence on its own apparent seriousness — the only way for its comic qualities to come across.
It may well become a cult favourite, like Cube. — Guardian News & Media 2010