Film Review: Splice

Splice. 104 minutes. Rated MA15+. Directed by Vincenzo Natali. Screenplay by Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor.

If there’s one reason to see this rough and ready little B-Grade shocker, it’s to play that good old ‘spot the movie it’s trying to be’. It’s a great game, and on occasions like this, a far better way of getting bang for your buck than expecting to become involved in what the filmmakers loosely define as plot.

Scientists Clive (Adrien Brody powering along in career sabotage mode) and Elsa (Sarah Polley in perfect “you expect me to do what?!” mode) are fiddling around with genetic engineering experiments. There’s lots of dialogue about isolating protein, cloning, DNA and all sorts of other random scientific waffle that takes place in front of some impressive, heavy-duty scientific equipment. Curiously, it’s actually difficult to imagine these two being able to successfully engineer a mug of Continental Cup-a-Soup between them, but suddenly we have a mutant child/creature who, before you can say “Lots of Noodles”, grows into a mutant young adult called ‘Dren’ (Delphine Chanéac with more than a little help from the special effects department).

Clive and Elsa then spend the rest of the movie educating, nurturing, imprisoning, surgically mutilating, chasing, punishing and generally torturing the poor creature until, as you might expect, she turns against them. And who can blame her? The only real surprise is that it takes her as long as it does to get some pay-back on our peculiar pair of nerdy control freaks.

Ms Chanéac’s mutant gets all the best moments and gives the best performance, which is even more bizarre given that most of her body is computer-generated. The promise shown by occasionally dodgy mutant baby creature quickly evaporates as we find ourselves in ‘abandoned country house and surrounding snow-bound forest territory’ where Natali (Cube), cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata (The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf) and editor Michele Conroy try desperately hard to ramp-up the tension and suspense, but only end up not being able to increase the body count quickly enough to maintain even a nominal amount of interest.

As for our game, I spotted Alien, Jeepers Creepers and Frankenstein – but I won’t say anymore because I don’t want to ruin your fun, especially since it’s the only fun you’ll have.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.