“Do you think it’s in pain?”

Some stories so acutely tap into our collective consciousness that they become part of the narrative firmament, something so fundamental and universal that the story becomes a name to describe itself, becomes something that generations of artists riff on and interpret in their own way. In its grandiose, operatic depiction of hubristic recklessness, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein best articulated the perils of playing God. Its DNA is found in everything from the wacky (Young Frankenstein) to the sublime (The Spirit of the Beehive). Shelley’s story is the framework for Vincenzo Natali’s Splice, but Natali’s film tries to bring something new into the tale: domestic strife.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast, a pair of biochemists involved in the science of gene splicing. (Their names come from Colin Clive, who played the doctor in Bride of Frankenstein, and Elsa Lanchester, who played the titular creature.) Since eventually their ambition must get the best of them, when we meet Clive and Elsa, they’re combining animal DNA in order to advance medicine. The creatures they create are pleasingly Cronenbergian. Not scary, exactly, but definitely disturbing, like the overlap in a Venn diagram of phalluses and worms. This is most likely what this kind of science would produce. Not pretty, but functional. This helps to establish Splice‘s aesthetic.

There’s a lot of science jargon in this movie, and to its credit, it never has a character exasperatedly huffing “English, please!” Clive and Elsa know it, so that’s enough. Brody and Polley have good chemistry together, which is essential since most of their scenes are opposite one another. They seem sane, which adds fun and tension to scenes like the one in which they inform their financial backers that they want to move into using human DNA in their experiments. (Tellingly, the Big Pharma company they report to isn’t aghast at the notion; they just want to start monetizing Clive and Elsa’s extant breakthroughs.) The best way to make a mad scientist is to tell a sane scientist that they’re not allowed to do a radical experiment, so you can imagine what happens next.

I have to go on a brief tangent here, and while these complaints might sound petty, they wound up affecting the impression that Splice made on me. This film looks hopelessly dated at times. Not in a “this came out in 2009 and I’m watching it in 2019” way; more of a “this looks like it was filmed in 2003 and was shelved until 2009” way. The music choices are godawful – think generic CSI butt rock designed to glamorize the tedious task of computing – but far worse than that are the sartorial choices. Brody and Polley’s wardrobes are so tacky that they undermine the artistry that Natali, a veteran of Hannibal, brings to the film. At times it looks like Brody and Polley wandered off the set of Hackers, into a time machine, and stepped out onto the set of Splice. Yes, I’m aware that this sounds petty, but the fact is, the wardrobe and soundtrack (not to mention the hair – oh God, the hair!) do the film a disservice, making it look…well, silly.

Thankfully, the creature effects are enough to make up for that. Clive and Elsa successfully incubate an embryo, which emerges from a pupal sac in a genuinely tense scene. Clive wants to kill it; Elsa doesn’t. And here we get the domestic drama at the heart of Splice.

In a lot of ways, Splice is a movie about a crumbling relationship, wrapped in the clothes of a horror film. Relationships are all about compromise, yes, but when you’re with someone who doesn’t challenge your mania – who lets you go ahead with a human gene splicing experiment when he has the chance to stop it – you create a toxic echo chamber. Whenever either Clive or Elsa capitulates, things invariably turn worse. Clive wants children and Elsa doesn’t; she relents only when given the chance to parent a new species. Elsa wants to move and Clive doesn’t; she gets her wish when they relocate their experiment to a derelict farm upstate.

Splice functions almost as a drama about two people dealing with an unplanned pregnancy. Their attitudes toward the creature change more than once over the course of the film, which is a nice through-line. Both Brody and Polley are given the chance – Polley more than Brody – to show the desperation, mania, and hope brewing behind their eyes. The creature grows up, into an angelic monster called Dren (it’s “Nerd” backwards, get it?), played excellently by Delphine Chaneac. Her performance is all in the way she contorts her body, the probing questions she wordlessly asks with her enormous eyes, which are set just a little too far apart to be human.

Sadly, Splice doesn’t go full-on creature feature until the final act, which is too bad, because the design of Dren (and Chanaec’s performance) is the film’s bright spot. Dren is childish and menacing without going too far into the realm of either. Natali’s camera doesn’t shy away from Dren’s physical beauty, which leads to the film’s most controversial (and derided) scene, wherein Clive has sex with Dren. This is the final nail in the relationship’s coffin, and the point at which Splice decides to become a horror film.

The ending is more or less what you would imagine it would be, albeit well-framed by Natali. It’s a bit confusing, because it leaves you wondering what you want out of Splice. The domestic drama at its heart is compelling, but there’s also the bones of a decent shocker here. It’s a film made of the DNA of several other films. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s just not quite there. Just like Frankenstein’s monster.

10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation

10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter

10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw

10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

10/5: Kill List / A Field in England

10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch

10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep

10/9: Cube / Creep 2

10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual

10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan

10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond

10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow

10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem

10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse

10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster

10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan

10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound

10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher

10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed

10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy

10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night

10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void

10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon

10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie

10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder

10/28: High Tension / You’re Next

10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug

10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires

10/31: Saw / Saw II

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