But as we observe the strange creature (nicknamed ‘Dren’) that emerges from their endeavours and mutates from a helpless baby to a rebellious, sexually curious teen and then into a wholly different kind of adult, we also bear witness to the unfolding of a bizarre tragedy, in which the many flaws and foibles of the ‘parents’ are passed on to the child, with nurture playing at least as big a role as nature. After all, Colin Clive played Dr Frankenstein in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), while Elsa Lanchester played the monstrous Bride – and sure enough, here the human characters are no less a messy mismatch than their medically constructed offspring, in a film that brings home the idea that we are all products of our upbringing as much as our genes.Ĭlive and Elsa against both the law and the express instructions of their pharma company’s CEO (Simona Maicanescu) and their lab’s manager (David Hewlett), engage in an underground experiment splicing animal and human DNA. Though they may not realise it, Clive and Elsa themselves are a couple caught up in this cinematic naming game.
For all the choreographed harmony that their names conjure, we sense Fred and Ginger too will come to a sticky end. The names of their previous, failed hybrid couples, visible on a shelf of sample jars, display similar film savvy, although out of ‘Bogie and Bacall’, ‘Sid and Nancy’ and ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, only the first suggests anything like conjugal bliss (and on-screen, even Humphrey and Lauren appeared together mostly in dark, violent thrillers). When Splice begins, young, high-powered biochemists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) have just created a male and female pair of slug-like genetic hybrids, wittily dubbed ‘Fred and Ginger’, to enact what the scientist couple refers to as the ‘dance’ of DNA.
Review: Some couplings just were not meant to be. Synopsis: In this updated riff on Frankenstein, directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali ( Cube, Cypher), scientific hubris and tainted love combine to create an unstable and dangerous hybrid.