Splice

Though Sundance-screened and sporting an upscale cast, Vincenzo Natali’s Splice has a mad-science quality. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are Clive and Elsa, a married couple of “rock star” genetic engineers who are introduced midwifing the birth of a lab-grown, maggoty sack of tissue, which we’ll soon observe in a mating tango that’ll put you off your popcorn. Clive and Elsa then decide to toss a soupçon of human DNA into their recipe. What winds up in the incubator hatches a walking skinned rabbit, which develops into an increasingly humanoid girl with a wicked harelip. Though he’ll more than accept their adoptee in time, Clive is understandably creeped out at first by his wife’s coddling treatment of the thing, now christened “Dren.” In spite or because of the portentous, gathering-clouds score and accumulated Freudian gibble-gabble, Splice is a queerly funny movie. You can’t tell me that a moment like the Big Presentation where the front row of suits gets splattered isn’t supposed to be a knee-slapper. Of Splice‘s various primal scenes, that’s-just-wrong coitus interruptuses, and ridiculous dialogue delivered with unfailing conviction (“Was it ever about science?”), I am less certain of the intention.