Movie Review: Splice

Synopsis: Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are two young scientists who have been given the job of running a genetic laboratory at a large corporation to develop a protein using animal gene splicing from several different species. To speed up the process, they secretly take a chance and add human DNA to the experiment, resulting in a new animal species.

Splice is a pretty good little sci-fi/horror film that's equal parts thought-provoking and disturbing. There's a lot of tension throughout but I wasn't even going to consider it a horror movie until all hell breaks loose in the last 15 minutes or so. It's horror with a brain though as it raises quite a few ethical questions about research of this type.

The acting of Brody and Polley is great and helps the movie quite a bit. They build very human characters that are believable while they wrestle with some of the moral dilemma that they're facing. I did find one scene, which is also pretty disturbing, to be a bit over-the-line and had a hard time buying it. Personally I thought the movie was about to go completely off the rails at that point, but it actually then went a whole other surprising direction.

The effects are great and the newly created being, named Dren, is actually very realistic and well-done. If not, the movie wouldn't work at all.

All-in-all it's a nicely written, well acted, original, creepy sci-fi/horror film. It's a modern day Frankenstein (guess where the 2 main characters got their names?) that's pretty unpredictable and well worth a watch.

7.5/10