A Woman of Science
Splice is some seriously awesome scifi/horror, but Sarah Polley’s mad scientist is the film’s real revelation.
Vincenzo Natali’s Splice is just about everything I was hoping for: a smart, scary, visceral, well-acted, and good-looking two hours of scifi/horror. That alone would qualify it for accolades, as it’s been kind of a depressing year for both scifi and horror so far. But what really makes me excited about the film is its odd equal opportunity nature. With Splice, we finally get a female mad scientist worth the screen time.
Let me back up for a minute and reiterate how much there is to love about the film, in general. It’s a thoughtful (not quite revolutionary, but still very smart) and provocative take on cloning and genetics. Splice is a story about a couple of hotshot supernerds (dig the Bride of Frankenstein reference with the names of our two main characters: Clive and Elsa) played by Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody, who secretly make themselves a gene-spliced, mutant test-tube baby. Bloody hijinks ensue. As a portrait of hip nerddom, it’s practically unmatched in genre film: our protagonists are self-assured, very ironic, and deeply cool young scientists. (Their car? An AMC Gremlin. I rest my case.) A big part of the fun of Splice is that it’s an alternately scary and hilarious film about new parents. (In this way, it reminds me quite a bit of Joshua, an under-appreciated little psychological horror gem about Manhattan parenting.) Splice taps into so much complicated energy about new parenting that, at times, the character drama overshadows the horror feature – which is saying an awful lot about the acting chops that Polley and Brody bring to the film, since they’re competing for attention with an amazing monster. I can’t help but mention that “Dren,” the mutant baby who starts off looking a little bit like a turkey but who ends up being an uncanny human-like (but definitely not human) creature, is played to perfection as a child by Abigail Chu and as an adult by Delphine Chanéac. Thanks in part to these performances, seamless visual effects, and some strong writing, the film blurs the line between anthropomorphic identification and compassion in ways that are very compelling, which makes the blood and mayhem (some of it fun, some of it very painful to watch) of the film that much more effective.
Splice doesn’t quite hit Cronenberg levels of unease, but you’ll feel plenty uneasy by the end. In fact, one of the strangest accomplishments of Splice is the parenting/psychosexual love triangle that it creates between Clive, Elsa, and Dren. (This film plays with all sorts of Freudian, gender, and family conventions, and just when the audience is about to point its collective finger at either Clive or Elsa and say, “Ok, that’s really effed up,” the other parent comes along and does something REALLY effed up.) I don’t want to say anymore, because I just don’t want to spoil a single moment of the film.
But what I found truly exciting about Splice was Elsa. She’s a driven, accomplished young scientist – and a deeply troubled woman with lots of unresolved issues about motherhood. Her relentless desire to achieve results is clearly grounded in her traumatic childhood, and her conflicting impulses about Dren are rooted in a need to control. The psychology of Elsa’s character breaks no new ground in cinema. In many ways, her profile is completely stereotypical. But here’s what’s marvelous: Elsa is a completely realized and powerful woman of science. We get a lot of Pandora’s boxes in scifi and horror, but they’re rarely made by Pandora herself. And this Pandora is brought to life by Sarah Polley, who is just a great great great actress. By the end of the film, we really see Elsa as pretty unhinged, and that’s exactly the point: she’s a mad woman scientist. And like all mad scientists, she must contend with the results of her scientific hubris. Now THAT is breaking some new ground in cinema.
Splice evokes gender in really interesting ways, too. It exploits our cultural anxiety about intersexed creatures (a long-standing horror convention is hybrid creatures, and sex/gender is a common embodiment of that hybridity) even as it raises issues about how Elsa and Clive “gender” Dren. Splice will be fodder for good feminist critique for a long time. So, yay.
(Despite the fact that I’m recommending Splice like crazy, I would totally understand if new or expecting parents would want to sit this one out. Yeah. Also, I want to give a trigger warning about the film, too.)
