Film Review: Splice (2010)

I considered many possible introductions to this review of Splice. I thought about exploring how the creative process somehow prevents us from achieving an ideal result because of unexpected roadblocks; you have to work around them, but there's no way to avoid them and the project suffers. I thought about exspousing the glories of a modern day Frankenstein that doesn't feel the need to follow Shelley's beautiful framework, for better and worse.

Then, I realized how angry Splice had made me. Yes. Angry.

I'm aware it is irrational to be mad at a film. It exists as a product and can bare no feelings back in retribution. It has no mind beyond the efforts of the team that created it. This isn't some artificially produced creature derived from a laboratory. It's a series of still images synched up to sound and spread like a virus throughout culture. Some blossom with exponential growth, others survive, and others shrivel up and die. Films, as objects, do not deserve such emotional reaction.

Yet, when a film manages to strike a chord with an audience, it becomes far more significant than its individual components. The characters become real to us. We become invested in what happens to them and want it to turn out well for the good guys and poorly for the bad guys. We want their story to amuse us, excite us, frighten us, somehow engage us in ways we never imagined possible.

But what happens when that promise of life created by masterful craftsmanship is thrown away in the last 20 minutes of a film? What are we, as paying filmgoers, supposed to feel? What is the appropriate protocol for the rapid deterioration and destruction of something that was so pure and good for so long of its life?

For me, it's anger.

Splice has so much going for it before the film even starts. The director/writer, Vincenzo Natali, is the artist behind one of the most inventive and disturbing sci-fi/horror crossovers of the 1990s: Cube. Through an unexpected series of twists and turns, believable characters, and startling raw effects, Natali produced a film that shocked and amazed its audience without providing any easy answers as to why anything that happened in the film happened. The stars of Splice are Academy Award winner Adrian Brody and Genie Award winning writer/director Sarah Polley. They inhabit these characters in a beautiful, naturalistic way that never feels forced or manipulated.

Combined with some of the most realistic computer-generated effects I've ever witnessed in a film and an extraordinary performance through massive amounts of make-up and special effects by Delphine Chaneac (as Dren, the experiment), Splice honestly felt for most of its running time like it could have been one of the greatest films I had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen.

The story concerns dating biochemists Clive (Brody) and Elsa (Polley). They have become media darlings as the greatest genetic splicers of all time. When the film opens, they have successfully combined the DNA of multiple animal and plant species to produce Ginger, a mate for the already engineered Fred. They are amorphous blobs that hold the key to producing massive amounts of synthetically engineered organic compounds for farming. For Clive and Elsa, that is not enough. They want to take the project to the next phase: human integration. Their major investor wants the entire laboratory dedicated to the isolation of a specific protein strain for financial gain, leaving Clive and Elsa no choice but to defy all laws imaginable and splice human DNA with the DNA of Fred and Ginger.

There would be no film if the experiment wasn't successful. The result is Dren, a rapidly aging human/animal/plant hybrid with a lethal stinger on its tail. Elsa and Clive raise it in secret, promising themselves at each stage of development to terminate the experiment when they prove they are successful. There would be no film if the experiment was terminated, either.

The first hour of Splice is everything you could hope for in sci-fi/horror crossover. There is a compelling storyline. The performances are wonderful. The effects are used sparingly to enhance the story, not distract from narrative deficiencies. The screenplay is tighter than you can imagine, with not a single line or action extraneous to arriving at the final destination of the film. Everything, from lighting (the standard horror blue has never looked so appropriate) to camera angles (there are shots I never considered possible that work beautifully here) to the mixed score/soundtrack (lovely music with meaning used where appropriate), is done to perfection.

Then, they hit the wall. The entire film is leading up to this horrid scene that instantly changed the mood in the theater. Where my fellow moviegoers where on the edge of their seats watching in absolute silence before, they quickly shifted to private conversations and jeers at the screen before the scene was even half-over. The scene that derails the film was inevitable. Everything led up to it perfectly. It's just the content of the scene and the ramifications of it tipped the naturalistic sci-fi/horror into pure melodrama. It was more befitting a late-night teen soap opera than a film indebted to the best of literary Gothic.

While Natali does his best to get the film back on track, the climactic sequence of Splice plays out like every single person in the film gave up. Gone are the inventive camera angles, subtle scoring, and intelligent scene crafting. Instead, the film descends into shaky-cam hell and no one comes out unburned.

I can only think of one other film that so quickly made me angry in the end. It's a beautiful, well-crafted horror film from the 1970s. It featured great performances, a wonderful soundtrack, tight writing, and inventive cinematography. The name of that film is Suspiria, and I have hated it for 10 years for how much it let me down. Splice is my new Supiria. How did something so beautiful and good turn so wrong so quickly? It's a mystery I have no intentions of solving.