The Ashcan

Reeling: Splice

Posted on 30. Jun, 2010 by Simon in Film, Reeling

Movies can affect us in myriad ways by the time we walk out of the theatre. A film can take you on a journey; it can make you happy, or sad, or curious, or humble, or giddy and full of quotable one-liners.

Watching Splice will do none of those. No. Watching Splice will fuck you up.

Of course, you can’t help but feel that was always kind of the point. Director Vincenzo Natali (The Cube) wrote and directed Splice, and at no point do the surreal-in-its-realism visuals or its uneasy plot developments leave anything to question — this film is meant to rape your imagination. Possibly, literally. You’ll have to watch it to understand what I mean.

As a result, reactions to Splice’s enigmatic accomplishment can (and will) be widely open to subjectivity.

On a superficial level, Natali and producer Guillermo Del Toro made a perfectly adequate monster/horror genre film starring two (in my opinion) underrated performers in Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody. The duo play an overwrought couple of biogenetic engineers with the will and the means to create a brand new species, then splice said science project with human DNA to create a half-and-half Frakenthing. Appropriate mayhem ensues.

Splice borrows heavy elements of its premise from monster flicks of yore, notably the DNA melding conceit of 1995 flop Species (known more for naked Natasha Henstridge than anything else) and the cautionary moral soap-boxing on genetic engineering from 1993′s Jurassic Park (and that’s not the only plot device Splice shares with Spielberg’s dino romp).

Compared to the two obvious influences listed above, Splice is somewhere in the middle — so what prevents Splice from being an utterly forgettable production? In short, the ending. The ending is completely, totally, fucked up.

But, arguably, in a good way.

I think.

If you replaced the last 40 minutes of Splice with rote genre pieces, it would probably be a really, really bad movie.

Instead however, Natali chooses the path less travelled, using his last half-hour to encroach on territory not often tread in any films, least yet campy science fiction thrillers.

Viewers are assaulted not with loud noises and graphic gore (although there is plenty of that) as much as they are unnerved by uncomfortable scenes of sexuality, outrageous moral decisions and empathy-wrentching emotional abuse.

What adds to the no-they-didnt reaction Splice successfully elicits is the pacing it uses to wrap up its frenetic final act. You can see every step the story takes on the way to its inevitable uncomfortable conclusion, and all along you’re watching thinking “no… they’re not going to…. oh god. no. please don’t…”

Then, of course, they do.

Horror or monster movies have classically succeeded in conventional ways. Scaring you with noises, blood and guts, frightening monsters or preying on your imagination by manipulating natural fears of the dark or the unknown.

Splice goes a different route. It attacks your sense of normalcy, and in a way, the idea of acceptable human behaviour.

If watching Jaws was like getting punched in the face and viewing The Ring was like being told an incredibly frightening ghost story, Splice instead chooses to emulate the feeling of being in the presence of a creepy uncle who borderline molested you as a child.

Maybe some people are into that type of thing, and I can understand perhaps being impressed with the novelty of a film being able to explore emotional areas not normally prodded by hollywood movies. I might even understand how for some, this makes Splice a fresh type of film.

For the rest of the movie watching public however.. let’s just never speak of this again.

Tags: Adrien Brody, Guillermo Del Toro, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Natasha Henstridge, Sarah Polley, Species, Splice, Steven Spielberg, The Ring, Vicenzo Natali