Splice Blu-Ray Review
Splice is a film that has great ideas, depth to those ideas, a plot that draws you in with very interesting and flawed characters and yet manages to slip on its own slippery goo in the final act, but then if you paused the film before that act materialises and guessed how you thought it may end you may find you are actually fairly close.
We have a couple of scientists played by Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody who achieve some major success with their splicing antics in the lab on their road to curing disease. Being such a questionable practise they decide to take the next step themselves unauthorised and breed a new creature that starts to eveolve into humanoid form. The older and bigger she gets, the more attached they become to their new baby and decide to keep the project going.
It is from here that it starts to get very creepy as both mummy and daddy do some very questionable things along the way making them for the oddest couple of protagonists in a while. It is this risk that makes the film worthwhile as we are more and more removed from humanity by those who are setting out to cure it.
Brody and Polley are both used to indie as well as genre film making and are well cast. The director, Vincenzo Natali remains one of the more interesting directors out there after Cube and Cypher. If only he made films more often!
The third act does dwindle into nonsense, but does at least have a climactic scene that pulls it back into the questionable realms of the first half of the film.
The extras are fairly minimal. There is a 30 minute ‘making of’ that does pick up on the films production process. There is also half an hour of interview footage with the director. Oh, and a trailer. We think there was a commentary recorded but it hasn’t appeared!
Steven Hurst