Splice: a review

Splice is riddled with problems, which doesn't stop it from being often interesting, or occasionally powerful, or better-shot than it could have gotten away with. Several critics have said that it is intelligent and provocative for the first 2/3s and then totally gives in to genre-cliché and mindless action, but this isn't quite fair. There was a lot that was cliché and lazy about the first 2/3s, too. It's true that the last act can be swapped with that of pretty much any domestic horror movie, but this isn't necessarily a drawback. Cliché is only a bad thing when it's employed for no reason, and the release of energy at the end of Splice was a long, long way coming.

Two scientists (a couple) engineer an organism from the DNA of several species, including human. One of the biggest problems this movie runs into is that it can't quite find a balance between archetype and realism. There are lots of little affecting touches that are clearly intended to make Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) seem like real people and not just labcoats, and these work, more or less: Polley's obsession with little tic-tac things, Brody's embarrassingly hipsterish T-shirts, the Japanese anime art framed above their bed. I'm all for realism, but it takes an assured touch to combine it with a broader underlying metaphor, such as when the organism they're incubating comes to term several months before it's supposed to. The glass incubation chamber vibrates and bloats menacingly, blue water sloshes, Polley cries out in pain as the organism grabs her and water rushes out as the chamber cracks. The umbilical cord tears.

This, clearly, is the birth of their child, a subject broached but dismissed earlier by the couple. And because it is a new species, the subject of the film broadens beyond the couple into a question concerning humanity. This is why the best shot of the film is one of Brody and the teen-aged, female creature slow-dancing to a jazz record. It suggests so many things about the nature of the relationship between man and his creation, about the possibility of coexistence and what it might look like, conveyed in the simplest and most direct of images.

This is also where Brody's and Polley's appealing realism falls short. As the subject of the film migrates from domestic intrigue to an interrogation of nature and the origin of species, we need protagonists who are not just interesting people but also archetypal, or even mythic. Big ideas need big, broad characters to support them. Polley achieves some of this by channeling a strong maternal instinct, characterized by devotion, blindness, competition; this is at its most powerful in the scene on the operating table, when she finally seems to realize what she has done. For most of the movie, though, the dynamic between Brody and Polley seems strangely out of tune with the creature locked in the barn. This is maybe why the humans in Kubrick's 2001 appear drained of individuality, and move and speak so flatly: they exist in the way that atoms and the universe exist. Brody's and Polley's normality and specificity collapse the scale of the drama.

But there's so much to praise as well, like the establishing shots in the first half of the movie, which don't only show us where the scene is taking place but also convey something of the disorientation and claustrophobia of city life. When the couple leaves the city for Elsa's farm, an archetypal return to nature, I felt something fundamental shift inside me: at last, the creature - itself a hybrid of civilization and nature - can contend with the outside world, and the questions raised by the first half can be fully answered. What we actually get is a little chase through the woods, and a resolution whose consequences barely extend beyond this weird little family.

That's the wrong ending. It's often smug or ignorant (or both) for a critic to suggest how a work of art should have been done, but I'm going to risk it. The first half is an exercise in withheld energy, both violent (it's clear from the start that the creature is too dangerous to be contained, and that it responds only arbitrarily to Elsa's mothering) and sexual (as Manohla Dargis puts it, the creature turns into a "va-va-va-voom adult"). Clearly some shit's gonna go down. The right answer for the film, I think, would have been to go War of the Worlds - big to the point where the little domestic squabbles of Elsa and Clive lose all significance. Only then could the movie retain some of its archetypal power. It's a matter of balance.

Instead, the movie ends on an oddly intellectual note. The creature commits two crimes at the end, one against each member of the couple, and it seems that this was just to set up a question, presented in the last shot. The sacrifice is for intellectualism at the expense of what film does best, which is to convey truth through image and sound. I could say here that Splice could have been a much better movie if all these things were fixed, but honestly, it might just be easier to start over with something else.