Splice Review

Guillermo del Toro may have been out of commision for the past two years, but before that, he had sense enough to sign on to produce this disturbing sci-fi film. Splice is a flawed film about flawed people, and that is both praise and criticism of the film. It tells the tale of the two top scientists in the field of genetic splicing, and their quest to create a successful creature using human DNA. The result is Dren, an expressive young girl with dreams of freedom beyond the confining walls of the labs and farms she calls home.

The film encompasses the changes and development of not only Dren, but of her relationships with her two parents. Throughout the first hour or so of the film, we see how Elsa turns from a loving and caring mother, to an abusive, demanding, and restrictive authoritarian. On the other side of the coin, we see Clive go from hating the "mistake" he's created, to becoming a compassionate friend of Dren's. In some ways a little too compassionate.

The trailers for Splice heavily advertise this film as some sort of horror flick, but it doesn't truly reach that point until the last 12 minutes. Furthermore, the last forty minutes feel somewhat forced to move the story forward in a way it shouldn't have gone logically. The director, Vincenzo Natali, who was for the first hour dedicated to the emotional arcs of the characters, abandons that to push the plot towards a horrific conclusion. By the end Dren, who we spend the entire film learning from, and empathizing with, simply becomes a plot element, and loses all remnants of the humanity she should still have. Some of the events intended to shock dramatically, just come off as comedic.

The character deaths in the film are also inconsistent. Usually spending an hour and a half with good characters who we care about should warrant a little heartache when some of them die. Unfortunately, Natali poorly executes these sequences, which could have so easily been done well. It's horrifying for a director to be so good at one point, and then so awful a second later. As for the technical values of the film, they are all spectacular. The creature design for Dren is suberb, and the visual effects used to bring her to life are astonishing considering the low cost of the film.

Composer, Cyrille Aufort, weaves a meloncholy and creepy score that becomes a little too stereotypical during the horror sections of the film. Tetsuo Nagata's cinematography sticks very much with what works, which isn't a bad thing, but isn't a great thing either. Splice has me split down the middle, caught between the intricately intriguing relationships and the distracting hillarious credulity of the second half's plot twists. It's quite disgusting at times, and it makes me wish I'd never actually seen it.

C+