Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play a superstar geneticist couple who at one point debate abortion in Vincenzo Natali’s smart, scary — and at times very funny — horror movie “Splice.”
The fetus in question has been engineered from the genes of various animals — as well as Polley’s character, Elsa. Brody’s Clive, whose ethical concerns have been pushed away by his girlfriend, wants to destroy the hybrid embryo before it comes to term, as they previously agreed.
But her burgeoning maternal instincts prevail. Needless to say, keeping this particular baby turns out to be a huge mistake.
Clive and Elsa (amusingly named for the stars of “Bride of Frankenstein”) work for a bio-med company that’s pressing them to monetize their earlier gene-splicing experiment — a pair of tongue-like creatures they’ve dubbed Fred and Ginger — before it goes belly up.
The couple is so preoccupied with their latest hybrid — which they hide from their colleagues — that Fred and Ginger end up giving investors a demonstration that’s unforgettable in ways that are entirely unforeseen, and quite hilarious.
Clive and Elsa are busy in the basement raising the rapidly growing, feral creature (Abigail Chu, with lots of help from computer-generated images) that Elsa names Dren (spell it backward). The childless Elsa is so captivated by Dren’s capacity for learning that she’s willing to overlook her offspring’s increasingly homicidal tendencies — another mistake when your “daughter” has a lethal stinger in her tail.
Elsa’s boyfriend, meanwhile, tries to drown Dren after some particularly nasty misbehavior — but, wouldn’t you know it, she’s sprouted a set of gills.
Then they move her to a barn on Elsa’s old family farm, where Elsa starts putting Dren in dresses and makeup. Dren (now played by a digitally enhanced Delphine Chanéac) begins to resemble a cross between a bald supermodel and a rabbit with wings.
Even Clive has developed paternal feelings at this point, which Dren very unfortunately mistakes for an entirely different kind of love.
I’m not going to give away anything more except to warn that the film includes various combinations of incest, bestiality and rape — though the gore and violence are relatively modest by contemporary horror film standards.
Brody and Polley’s performances keep the film grounded in a semblance of reality even when it threatens to go over the top near the end, and director Natali infuses the proceedings with a consistent sense of nail-biting dread.
“Splice,” whose DNA includes a bit of “Rosemary’s Baby” as well as many other movies, is a hybrid with enough surprises to qualify as one of the few high points in a disappointing movie season so far.