[A review of this film is also the first thing I wrote for SciFi.de, where I’ve just started my regular guest-blogging. You can find it here. (German)]

Splice is the newest movie by Vincenzo Natali, starring Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley and Delphine Chanéac.

Plot:
Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are successful geneticist, currently working on animal splices to create new species that will help with medical discoveries etc. After their big breakthrough, they want to add human genes to the mix, but their company tells them not to because the public outrage would be to big. Clive and Elsa decide to go ahead with it anyway and create something entirely new: Dren (Delphine Chanéac), who is intelligent, cute and dangerous.

Splice is basically a modernised Frankenstein story. It is a decent horror movie, with very good performance and pretty awesome special effects. But where it starts off with a tight plot, in the end it doesn’t manage the same poignancy as the original Frankenstein, or much poignancy at all. It’s also the movie with the most gender problems and WTFery I’ve seen in a long time. [And yes, I’m including Eclipse in this.]

[SPOILERS]

The cast was fine: Adrien Brody is always good. Sarah Polley isn’t bad, though she does get overshadowed by Adrien Brody. Both then get played into a corner by Delphine Chanéac, who really rocks as Dren. [Partly also because of her terrific make-up, but mostly because she’s a really good actress.] The special effects were generally great.

Everything else wasn’t.

It is obvious that this movie aims to be a meditation on creation / science / life / the universe / everything. And that is probably the reason why you immediately start to interpret what’s happening in that context. And while this works fine in the first half of the film, the plot gets completely frayed later on, the movie is all over the place and any kind of interpretation just leads to huge confusion.

And this doesn’t even begin to address the things this movie is saying about gender. I mean, Girl!Dren seduces her creator/father/scientist-who-studies-her [who participates enthusiastically in the whole thing]. Then Dren changes her sex and becomes Boy!Dren and immediately goes on to rape his creator/mother/scientist-who-studies him. And that is wrong on so many levels…

I think we can disregard the whole incest thing because even though Dren and Elsa share some DNA (which was such a telegraphed twist, even the people next door watching another movie could have told you), Elsa and Clive might just be the worst and un-parenty parents ever. But as long as Dren is a woman, she’s all giggly and seductive and then she becomes male and suddenly, he’s a rapist (and his fixation immediately moves from Clive to Elsa because homosexuality is so ewww). That is fucking insulting to men and women, both. And let’s not even talk about the whole “Elsa doesn’t want to have kids of her own because her mother was abusive, which is the only valid reason not to want to have children when one has a uterus”-thing.

Summarising: turn off any kind of gender consciousness, and this might be a good film.