Test-Tube Tale Has Hubris and Heart

I love seeing real-looking hardware in a movie. Yeah, Jarvis in Iron Man is awesome, but beat-up keyboards, patches and ASCII characters tickle a very sensitive part of my brain. I also love it when a speculative work of fiction doesn’t club you over the head with exposition. What better way to engage an audience than by making them ask, at the right moments, “wait, what’s going on?”

The independently produced Canadian sci-fi/horror flick Splice has both of these qualities popping out of every frame.

Writer/director Vincenzo Natali, best known for the film Cube (which, one could argue, is a little like Saw with an advanced degree) takes what he swears is real life science and gives it just a slight “what if?” push.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are young geneticists in love, poking around with hybrid “chimeras” looking for real world applications from their unique protein structures. The first act has them playing around with amorphous blobs called Fred and Ginger, but, much like Eve in the Garden, Polley has to defile God’s law and take it one step too far.

Or does she? Splice takes the entirely gutsy (these days) position that maybe scientific advancement isn’t wholly immoral. (Think about that next time you get from L.A. to New York City in six hours, Glenn Beck!) It is within this gray zone that Natali’s story excels and, man, does it get gray!

As the posters and ads have shown, the scientists create Dren, a creature not-of-nature, and just how typically “horror movie” it gets is something that . . .you need buy a ticket to find out. Suffice it to say that there are some quality jump scares and, if you see it in the right kind of theaters, more than one opportunity to shout back at the screen “oh no she didn’t!”

Splice is a genre picture that, almost without you noticing it, gets under your skin for both creepy crawly and emotional gains. I’m not the only one making comparisons to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, another gross SF/horror mash-up that can leave you surprisingly moved.

The picture’s not all perfect, however. It gets a bit unraveled toward the end, where it also suffers a tad from its low budget. Then again, key moments of its winning WTFness are certainly borne from the picture’s non-Hollywood provenance.

Vincenzo Natali’s next project will either be J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (!) or William Gibson’s Neuromancer (!!). Either way, he’s the right man for the job.