Splice

Directed by Vincenzo Natali

(R)

***

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Splice is a “pleasurably shivery, sometimes delightfully icky horror movie about love and monsters in the age of genetic engineering,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are a pair of married genetic engineers who, instead of having their own baby, create an animal-human creature, chillingly played by France’s Delphine Chanéac. Director Vincenzo Natali welcomes her into the world with a “thickening air of dread.” Taking cues from Frankenstein films, The Fly, and Rosemary’s Baby, he has created a “disturbing, thoughtful mutant of a movie,” said Keith Phipps in The A.V. Club. The real horror here stems from the psychological dynamic between the couple and their test-tube baby. Exploring issues surrounding reproduction, biotechnology, and the nature-versus-nurture debate, Natali formulates “grotesque caricatures of real-life parenting discomforts.” Yet Splice is too much of an “unholy mess” to convincingly explore all the themes it raises, said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. The incoherent script “is silly when it should be spooky, cold when it should boil over, and dumb when it should be smart.”