Cut it Down

By Jonathan Kiefer

How do we account, Splice asks, for the kindred dorkdom of lab-cloistered scientists and monster-movie completists? Are we talking nature or nurture here?

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are Clive and Elsa, two fetching young geneticists whose romantic forays into bioengineering go about as well as you’d expect from a movie that names its characters after actors in

Bride of Frankenstein

. Which isn’t to say that director Vincenzo Natali is especially old-fashioned. Rather, he seems almost to strain for edgy topicality. It’s just that he’s also preoccupied with matters of heritage.

After combining the DNA of various animals into enormous, pharmacologically useful slugs, Clive and Elsa now are eager to see what they might whip up by throwing human genes into the mix. Their corporate overseers seem less keen on the idea, but Clive and Elsa are ambitious. And they seem to understand each other.

“I am not spending the next five years digging through pigshit for enteric proteins,” Elsa says. “Me neither,” Clive replies, after a considered pause.

Natali promptly supplies a scientists-at-work montage and, before we or they know it, Clive and Elsa have become the proud, but ashamed parents of a little baby rodent-bird-amphibian-arthropod girl named Dren.

So this is a weird situation, but apparently it’s better than the pigshit and does at least present some invigorating challenges, both personal and scientific. Not to mention cinematic: Natali marshals excellent special effects with discretion.

Then, needing space and privacy to fully slough off the pretense of their professional principles for parental ones, Clive and Elsa spirit their mutant daughter away to Elsa’s conveniently long-abandoned family farm.

Under these increasingly preposterous circumstances, it becomes clear Clive and Elsa don’t understand each other as well as they’d hoped. As for Dren, well, kids grow up fast, don’t they? Especially when movies need them to. Soon, she has developed to the point of being played as a nominal adult by the model Delphine Chanéac—all ornery, attention-wanting, bald and intensely attractive, like Sinéad O’Connor with a stinging tail and kangaroo legs.

Suffice it to say there’s a lot going on in Splice. It’s not quite the subversive cult-movie romp it could have been, but transgenderism, incest and bestiality all at once have to count for something. Unfortunately, leaving no trope unturned means not giving any enough consideration. But Brody and Polley are sharp and resourceful actors, impressively undaunted by all the confused instincts, Freudian eruptions and other karmic consequences hurled at them.

Upon advancing into its final act, Splice seems to be leaking inspiration and finally just trudges to an obligatory bore of an action climax. Of course, this might be par for the course in a movie whose point, at least in part, is: “Well, THAT wasn’t a very good idea.”

Splice

Directed by Vincenzo Natali

With Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, Brandon McGibbon, Abigail Chu, Simona Maicanescu

Regal Stadium 14

104 min.

R

Santa Fe Reporter