Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are experiencing every new parent’s worst fear — their child’s fever won’t go down. A cold bath isn’t helping, they aren’t sure what medicine to give her, and they can’t call a pediatrician for advice. Why? Dren is a “hybrid,” a secret lab experiment created by splicing human and animal DNA. She has amphibious lungs, a poison-tipped tail, and for good measure, retractable wings.
In Splice, two scientists play God with unwavering confidence yet find themselves utterly ill-equipped as parents. Creating life — depicted through rapid-fire montages featuring lines of computer code, test tubes, and DNA models — is easy, but nurturing it? No amount of lab tests can come close to replicating the trials of childcare. The drama doesn’t stint on sci-fi weirdness, featuring sex-swapping creatures and an uncomfortable stretch of interspecies psychosexual tension. But for all its bizarro energy and credulity-stretching science, it’s also surprisingly perceptive about what it takes to be a parent.
