Splice
Directed by Vincenzo Natali
Runtime: 104 min.
As metaphors go, I prefer François Ozon’s Ricky—the story of a love affair that produces an angelic love child—to the monstrous cloning experiment of Splice. It is a sign of our times that this gimcrack horror movie will be more widely seen than Ricky because its gruesome elements appeal to popular cynicism. Director Vincenzo Natali, working with producer Guillermo del Toro, achieves a second-rate—Canadian—tone that recalls Gothika and David Cronenberg’s early outrages. Splice follows Cronenberg’s template for medical repulsion and irrational fear about the body, science, human nature, love.
Ricky worked out Ozon’s own social anxieties and gender issues into a fairly highbrow spiritual mystery, but it was also beatific comedy. Splice is lowbrow but it’s also routine. Starting out with Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as Clive and Elsa, biochemist/lovers researching a new livestock medicine, their ignorance/hubris produces a monstrous hybrid of their repressed hostility: his sexual frustration, her childhood trauma. Natali’s set-up plays out with admirable efficiency (“Fuck!” Clive exclaims. “Exactly!” Elsa notes) but, except for a few lapses into camp (they work at a lab called NERD—Nuclear Exchange Research and Development), his concept covers ground that deep-thinking artists have recently rotated and enriched—like Ozon—or already scorched, like Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle.
It may not be a coincidence that Clive and Elsa’s mutant-clone bears an almost satirical resemblance to Barney’s wife, the pop-singer Björk at her youthful comeliest. But before that transformation (which limits actress Delphine Chenéac to needy-infant expressions), the lab creature gestates from a tongue-like lump of tissue into a penile-chicken hybrid that is able to switch sexes, sprout demonic wings and use the stinger in its tail like a scorpion. By this point, Splice isn’t merely ridiculous, it becomes immature in the same way as Cronenberg’s movies that impress viewers who would prefer grotesque nihilism to Barney’s surrealism or Ozon’s agape.
When the biochemists present their experiment to stockholders, a predictable King Kong panic ensues. It’s not as well-directed as any action sequence in the recent The Wolfman, yet that genre trope is as familiar as Splice’s hokey warnings about ruthless pharmaceutical corporations. The latter is catnip to gullible viewers who enjoy the anti-Americanism of Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host and the facile political commentary of del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s a 21st-century thing. What they don’t appreciate is the emotional amplitude that enriched such 1970s birth-horror movies as Ralph Nelson’s Embryo and Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, with its deeply felt parental anguish memorably performed by John Ryan. Those unpretentious films used horror to characterize self-discovery in the era of Watergate and the Pill.
Splice, with its variations on child abuse, merely exploits trendy cynicism but ends in predictable naiveté. Elsa’s mad-scientist declaration—“We’ll observe an entire life cycle in compressed time! We’ll never get another opportunity like this again!”—overlooks the miracle of reproduction that Ozon’s Ricky made basic and marvelous.
