Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2010) – Vincenzo Natali is a director with a nice visual eye, someone who, I imagine, would do wonderfully making luxury car commercials. And, I say that with the utmost of respect, believe me. And yet, he doesn’t seem to have quite the grasp on feature narrative, as proven in Splice, his new sci-fi/horror film about a genetically mutated monster child that just seems to pile on the absurdities in the least artful of manners.
Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley star as Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast, who live together as a couple and also work together as scientists of great renown who have created new organisms by mixing DNA from various sources, in order to create “enzymes” that help cure various diseases. They work for a powerful pharmaceutical corporation. In the face of mounting pressure from their benefactors not to take their research too far, they nevertheless decide to inject human DNA to their experiments, and the result is Dren, the monster baby at the heart of the story.
None of this is remotely convincing, and the film really isn’t trying to get the audience to take it seriously. (They work at a facility called Nucleic Enzyme Research and Development, or N.E.R.D.) The campiness should get an experienced viewer primed for some real horror movie delights, with frights and unexpected twists. What we get instead is wooden acting, an awful script, and very little narrative momentum to keep us interested in this tale of the bizarre.
I don’t mean to gang up on the actors. I like these actors. Sarah Polley got my attention as an actress in The Sweet Hereafter, and she’s gone on to direct My Life Without Me and the impressive Away from Her starring a wonderful Julie Christie. As for Adrien Brody… as I think about it now, Brody has been making great films for nearly 20 years now. No, my gripe is not with the thespians here. I honestly can’t think of anyone who could give any real performance with such tone deaf language and direction.
Watching how the designers and artists show Dren at various stages of her development did draw my interest. The armless goblin-like thing at the beginning stages soon develops into a young girl with alien eyes, and eventually into a young adult with overwhelmingly human features, even if she can fly and breathe under water.
The problem with the film is that it never gives you a way into the story that makes sense or that you might care about. The dramatic scenes are leaden and dull, full of really terrible, workmanlike lines, just getting the story from one scene to the next. All of this would be forgivable if it were a straight “B” picture, and it had some good old-fashioned frights in store for us. Unfortunately, for the most part, it is often caught taking itself far too seriously. The one exception is a scene where the two scientists’ legitimate offspring, two slug-like (and non-human) specimens who generate the valuable enzymes, destroy each other in a bloody mess in front of a theater full of stockholders. Brody’s reaction shot is priceless. This is the one instance where Natali has made the absurdity satisfying for the audience, by making it funny and unexpected. Comedy is all in the timing, which Natali too often forgets.
I guarantee this film will be taught in multiple NYU Gender Studies and Media Studies courses for years to come. There’s a pseudo-intellectual element to how the film deals with sexuality that I can imagine academics would drool over. Perhaps this is what fooled A.O. Scott, who’s own very positive review is the reason I went to see the film to begin with, or the 76% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes who have written about it positively. Ah well. Guess you just have to read this blog.