Clive initially wants to dispose of it as a mistake that could ruin their careers while Elsa takes to it as the daughter she didn’t think she wanted, until she starts to grow up (and grow up extremely quickly) and begins separating her own personality from her ‘mother.’ Just as with its inspiration, the scientists of “Splice” have a hard time wrapping their heads around any empathy for Dren. It’s supposed to be tragic, particularly in regards to Dren, but can you have a tragedy if you don’t care what happens to the characters? You tend to feel instead that they deserve what they get. That’s well and good to explain Dren’s motivations, but it also makes it impossible to care about these people when they end up pitted against their own creation. All of the creative attention has been left to Dren, leaving people who behave as the plot dictates, often unfeelingly. She’s clearly in the Whale Frankenstein mold, the monster you understand and care about despite the monstrous things they do.īut it’s hard to care for anything else because of the lack of care involving the human characters. Performance mixed with real effort in trying to understand what’s going on in her head, and project that to the audience, works more often than not. The filmmakers are making an attempt at real horror, using their premise as a way to explore things that are genuinely disturbing (especially once their creation, Dren, reaches sexual maturity) instead of merely startling and gory.ĭren (Delphine Chanéac) herself is extremely well realized in a mixture of performance, prosthetics from Howard Berger and George Nicotero and CGI. Determined to follow in its forbear’s footsteps, the filmmakers never shy away from the psychological implications of their story or from following it through to its worst possible conclusions. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I guess.Īnd to be fair, “Splice” has got its head fairly well secured on its shoulders. It’s been what, 150 some odd years since Mary Shelly wrote the original template and no one has been able to really build on that since James Whale’s seminal film. When you start out with your main characters named after the lead actors from “Bride of Frankenstein” you can be pretty sure you’re in for a big homage and that’s more or less what we get from “Splice.” Same prescriptive about the dangers of meddling with nature, same obvious lack of concern about the psychological care for the creation. Instead they decide to go the next step forward secretly, mixing human genes into their program by themselves and without telling anyone.
But when the heartless corporation they work for decides they’re going to have to give up the sexy lab work and spend a few years on actually making money, well that’s just too far. To do that, they’ve begun splicing the genomes of various animals together in order to create living laboratories for new vaccines. Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) don’t want much out of life except to save the world from genetic diseases.
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