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.)
Daybreakers actually looks less like horror and more like very stylized sci-fi (the presence of Hawke makes it feel all the more like Gattaca) until the first of many buckets of gore are unleashed on the audience (frankly, I haven’t seen this much head exploding since Scanners) at which point you know that you’re in for some serious horror action. But the premise is smart enough: it’s 2019 and vampires run the show, but they’re about to run out of human blood. Our Hawke hero is a reluctant vampire scientist searching for a blood substitute, who also has a trigger (fang?) happy brother in the vampire army. Enter Willem Dafoe, a redneck former vampire who goes by the name Elvis, and a group of hunted humans, led by the very compelling Claudia Karvan. Rounding out everything is a perfectly cast Sam Neill as a (literal) corporate bloodsucker. There’s a bit of social commentary here – Hawke works for the equivalent of big pharma – but it’s never particularly heavy-handed. Instead, the film is a pretty solid blend of brains, blood and actors who do a good job of selling the script, which gets pretty thin at times. Add to that a solid dose of muscle cars, a lot of cheeky visuals, chimpanzee vampires (chimpires!) the most ludiciously fantastic bloodfeasting sequence – we’re talking SLOW MOTION BLOODFEASTING here, people – and a couple of very good jolts and you’ve got yourself quite a January horror gem. It’s good!
1. Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) (2008). There’s nothing in this decade that really compares to this powerful, chilling, and inventive Swedish vampire thriller. It’s a dark and compelling (not to mention gender-bending) story of unhinged adolescence and mutual need, framed with some of the best cinematography you’re likely to find in any genre. It’s the best vampire film in two decades, and it’s a major addition to horror. 
1. Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) (1994). This amazing Italian horror film by director Michele Soavi (a protégé of Dario Argento) is a true one-of-kind: a frightening and funny movie about a cemetery caretaker (a fantastic Rupert Everett) who defends a small town from zombies that also doubles as a really sincere exploration of love, death and the meaning of it all. If that sounds a little too heavy, let me assure you that Dellamorte Dellamore is also one hell of a good time: visceral, violent, and weirdly erotic. It’s sublime. 
1. The Shining (1980). Kubrick’s very liberal adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining draws its power from being unlike most traditional horror films. It’s so quiet and monotonous (even boring, at times) that you almost don’t realize how scared you are until all hell breaks loose. In that way, the experience of watching The Shining is not unlike Wendy Torrance’s experience of sudden dread and terror when she realizes her world has been falling apart all along. What’s more, Kubrick evokes madness, ghosts, psychic phenomenon and family dysfunction in the most economical of ways, mixing the ordinary with the terrifying and then totally confusing the two. The Shining makes the banal creepy and then makes the creepy REALLY creepy. It’s the kind of film than can and does stick in your lizard brain forever. 
