Splice, aka Family Trauma Circus

Splice is the worst movie I have ever seen, period.

It will always take up a special place in my heart because when I saw it for the first time (yes, I’ve re-watched it, I’ll get to that) it was a bootlegged copy that I’d downloaded onto my shitty laptop in college and watched late one night by myself. I use the term “bootlegged” specifically here - because “pirated” implies that it was a copy of the movie that someone had uploaded. This was not the case. What I had was a filmed version of the movie from inside a movie theater. That’s right. Old-school bootleg shit. I wasn’t picky about a free movie and didn’t quite understand the mechanics of how to even search for better downloads - a side note, this is also how I ended up watching the unfinished version of the Wolverine movie wherein the climax inexplicably is littered with unfinished CGI scenes rather than the finale.

I love these mutated versions of movies. It transcends movie-watching and becomes an experience.

So let me tell you first that I lived through Splice in the lonely quiet of my dorm room with an in-movie audience with which to share this trauma. My cries of disgust and surprise were their cries of disgust and surprise. Moments of tension were broken by our shared hysterical laughter at the gross absurdity that is Splice.

This experience is one that I cannot separate from the movie itself, and for this reason I love the worst movie I have ever seen. Now let me tear into this bizarre and hysteria-and-cringe inducing feature.

Official Synopsis:

Geneticists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) specialize in creating hybrids of species. When they propose the use of human DNA, their pharmaceutical company bosses forbid it, forcing them to conduct experiments in secret. The result is Dren, a creature with amazing intelligence and physical attributes. At first, Dren exceeds their wildest dreams, but as she begins to grow at an accelerated rate, she threatens to become their worst nightmare.

Short: A secret experiment will break the laws of science and create an animal human hybrid. In 2010 their greatest creation will be unleashed.

The Metaphor:

Perpetuating the Cycle of Childhood Trauma

I guess I should really begin by discussing what Splice is. Or rather, what it’s about, because what it is is…not what it’s trying to be. In short, it’s about parenthood. The premise of this script is that two super-cool geneticists who are married and work in the same lab for a big pharma company have been splicing genes together in order to create proteins that are very effective at curing stuff. Further, they are creating a way to farm said proteins. They accomplish this by creating an entire organism. Instead of just, you know, the strands or whatever. This monster blob thing is a formless mass of cells that somehow has a distinguishable gender despite not really having any distinguishable…parts. This living, breathing, moving, blob is a boy, by the way.

In getting to know our nerd-couple, we learn that Mr. Doctor (Adrian Brody) would like for Mrs. Doctor (Sarah Polley) to pop out a little Doctor or two. She reminds him that she likes their childfree life the way it is. Seeing as how they both work the exact same long hours and she’s obviously a badass geneticist, it’s easy to see why she maybe wouldn’t want to be pregnant and then be a mother on top of all that. But that’s what he’s asking. It’s not like he even offers to be a full-time dad since he’s the one that wants kids - but even so, this seems like the kind of conversation a married pair of highly educated and obviously ambitious people would have already had. But whatever, people change their minds and it’s not like he can become a father without her input, right? But she also drops this hint that her mother was abusive and that she wanted to end that cycle of abuse. A very good reason to not want kids. She stood her ground. Right on. Solid messaging.

Until she goes and creates a life with her DNA without her husband’s consent and refuses to abort it when they both know very well that she should.

Let me explain.

They really want to farm this protein strain. Their pharma company has a lot of money riding on them finding it by, oh let’s pick an arbitrary deadline like an investor’s meeting. So they need to science some shit up by then or the pharma company will just scrap the whole project. Mrs. Doctor is sure that she can do it. She just needs something, something that’s missing. Some special secret something that will change everything. She finds it in the form of a “mystery” DNA strand. A new chimera blob is formed.

It’s cool at first but then Mr. Doctor says that her shenanigans have gone far enough and she has to terminate the preg- uh, the uh, project. She doesn’t, and it’s to term before they know it. Mrs. Doctor is amazed by this life she created all by herself, and Mr. Doctor begrudgingly helps her care for it - after getting over his initial attempts to murder it. At first, the chimera is hardly human-looking. Just legs, spine and a head. Then it starts to develop human characteristics rapidly. Before you know it, Mrs. Doctor is dressing the chimera up in her own childhood clothing to the obvious dismay of Mr. Doctor who wants nothing to do with the terrifying female toddler with the t rex legs. We get to experience the whacky arguments of new parenthood: who’s going to feed the chimera, were they even ready for a chimera, I’m going out to buy a pack of cigarettes don’t wait up. And the thing won’t stop growing up. They grow up so fast.

There comes a point where the chimera is simply too big to continue to hide at the lab where they work - because oh yeah, the project. Right. Seems like their career took an instant backseat to all this insane parenting. They’ve made another blob thing like the first one, without the special DNA ingredient, and it’s getting ready for the big investor meeting. It’s a female, this blob thing 2, and it seems to get along with blob thing 1. Mr. Doctor’s brother (who also works in the lab) has been taking care of it since they’ve been distracted by their chimera kid.

Anyway, so they move the chimera to the literal scene of Mrs. Doctor’s childhood trauma. A creepy abandoned house in the woods. Mrs. Doctor dresses the chimera up in more clothes, including makeup and dresses that she used to wear as a teenager. Oh, have we mentioned that this chimera thing is like, matured by now? As in…she looks basically like an adult even though she was born a few weeks ago? Yeah. And then Mrs. Doctor brings out her old makeup and bauble box and puts makeup on the chimera while she dresses her up, and almost says how she never thought she would be a mother. And instead of, you know, continuing to be aware of her own issues with abuse - instantly becomes abusive. To the point of locking her not-daughter not-human chimera child-woman in the same tiny bedroom that she, herself, would get locked in. Classic re-creation of abuse. The best kind of classic - an instant classic. As if hiding just beneath the surface of her patience, education, self-awareness and wonder at the life she created was someone who was resentful of the chimera and all the time - weeks - it was stealing from her. Or something.

That’s a body only a mother could…wait, what?

Mr. Doctor becomes at this point, the more gentle and understanding caretaker. He sticks up for his not-daughter not-human chimera child-woman. He gets closer to the chimera, even. A lot easier now that she’s…older.

Anyway, Mr. Doctor realizes that it’s Mrs. Doctor’s DNA in the chimera when he gets a whiff of uncomfortable sexual attraction to the chimera that he helped raise from a T Rex blob.

Dude. Sick.

I CAN TELL IT’S YOU. (He says, hiding his boner.) I JUST CAN.

It’s riiiiight about here where shit goes off the rails.

Up until these scenes, and the shitshow that comes afterwards, Splice was a pretty solid nail-on-the-head metaphor about parenthood. More than that, about the different and complex fears that we have, rational and irrational, about parenthood. We have the initial conversation about having kids, the allusion to her abusive childhood. We get the exhausted parents fucking up at work and ignoring their other kids (in this case, blob monsters) and each other because they’re putting so much work into this new one. We even step into the real territory of repeating abuses to others that have been done to us.

But what. The fuck. Are they doing. With Mr. Doctor being sexually attracted to the chimera.

There’s this creepy line that I’ve heard before that I absolutely fucking hate: “every little girl’s first crush is on her daddy”.

No. No. No.

Little girls don’t get crushes the way a full grown fucking man gets a crush.

So when Mr. Doctor slow dances with what has been his daughter in this psychotic extended metaphor and then catches himself about to kiss this girl like a woman - what are they doing, even??

Like - THERE IS A PERFECTLY GOOD WHOLE OTHER MAN IN THIS MOVIE THAT THEY COULD HAVE USED.

There’s this other doctor who’s been picking up their slack at work. He’s steady. He’s reliable. HE FUCKING KNOWS ABOUT THE CHIMERA AND WHERE THEY’RE TAKING IT.

It could have easily been that this guy shows up to the house looking for Mr. & Mrs. Doctor, like “hey, I’m tired of picking up your slack just because you have this girl-woman-chimera to take care of” and then he finds her alone, and she’s sexually curious about him. If they wanted to go for the “sexual rival” thing that they obviously think is why mothers abuse their daughters (and why all women hate each other, right?) then they could have set it up earlier that at work he flirts with Mrs. Doctor semi-successfully behind Mr. Doctor’s (exhausted and distant) back! Boom, then you have this sense of betrayal and outrage when Mrs. Doctor walks in to find Man Coworker fucking her little girl chimera-woman-thing.

But tell me. What do you get when Mrs. Doctor walks in to find Mr. Doctor balls deep in their daughter?

If you’re me, watching the bootleg version of this movie, you get stunned silence (that was meant to be tension) that breaks out into hysterical laughter. In truth, the laughter started exactly at the moment we collectively realized just what the fuck was about to happen. It peaked when the chimera-daughter-woman-thing spreads some goddamned flesh-wings as she grinds away on top of Mr. Doctor. At that point, Mrs. Doctor walking in was just icing on the cake.

Do I really even need to do the rest of the movie?

Fine.

Mr. Doctor chases after Mrs. Doctor to beg forgiveness and assert that they just kill their chimera-daughter-sex-partner and be done with the whole thing. They’d already fucked up pretty badly by bringing life into the world, imprisoning, torturing and having sex with it, so they may as well bring it full cycle and kill it and go their separate ways. Mrs. Doctor agrees because fuck that conniving child-woman-slut-thing and Mr. Doctor both.

And the next ten minutes after they arrive back at the scene of everyone’s childhood trauma inexplicably becomes a monster movie. The male coworker does show up (???!!!) and did I forget to mention that the male coworker is Mr. Doctor’s fucking brother? Like - how much perfect sense would it have made to have him bang the chimera-chick-teenage-mutant-winged-girl thing? Did Adrien Brody…did he demand that it be his character? Did that…test better with some other audience that sure as shit wasn’t mine? Anyway, male coworker-brother gets killed almost immediately. He’d brought some other monster movie fodder along with him; that guy gets dead, too. Turns out that just like their forgotten blob thing 2 that started out as a female but mutated into a male (yeah that presentation didn’t go well) was not a one-time problem. That’s right.

Chimera-slut-daughter-winged-woman-thing turns into a big scaly dude. And it’s got the hots for Doctor. Mrs. Doctor this time. Because pee pees go in vee vees even though just literally today it was banging its non-biological father.

Now it’s going to - just, what the hell were they thinking?

What even is this metaphor now? YOU CAN’T DROP AN ENTIRE METAPHOR RIGHT AT THE VERY END AND REPLACE IT WITH REGULAR MONSTER MOVIE SHIT.

Anyway, so man-made-man-chimera-killer-thing kills Mr. Doctor and full-on sexually assaults Mrs. Doctor, its biological mother. It has wings. It could fly the fuck away and find literally any other female ever.

But no. Not this movie.

We are treated with an end scene in which the powerful pharma executive boss (who was a woman, by the way, because women can be equally corrupted by power - go team?) is telling Mrs. Doctor that, you know, she really doesn’t have to carry this monster’s baby to term. Mrs. Doctor, high on hubris, insists on it. Big pharma boss lady bitch puts a sympathetic hand on Mrs. Doctor’s shoulder out of…solidarity? For working single mothers? (Because by the way, Adrian Brody was killed) Or, uh, women who decide to carry children created by assault to term? Or who uh, do the hard work of womaning even when, uh, children and work and men and empowerment and trauma and…you know, those reasons.

I don’t even almost begin to understand what the point of having the creature switch genders was. Not even the clumsiest of metaphors. I think Splice just wanted to make sure that everyone was assaulted by the end. Absolutely everyone, in every way possible. It wanted to be sure to pull at any string out there in the hopes that it resonated somehow with someone. It didn’t.

We’ve just all been assaulted, and left to contemplate our trauma.

And if you’re like me, maybe your way of coping is to revisit the memories with the safe distance of knowing exactly how it’s going to play out. Maybe you ease your own pain by sharing it with others, maybe by sitting your husband down to watch the almost two fucking hours of this nonsensical wretch of a creature movie. Maybe by writing about it, putting the images in other people’s minds. People like you.

But I want you to know, that if you ever actually watch this dreck, know that there will be moments when you will laugh in utter disbelief at the audacity this movie has taken with you, the brazenness of its assault, and that I, somewhere, am laughing with you.

Review:

Splice took a very simple monster-movie premise and executes it so badly that it cannibalizes itself. If you want to watch a horrifyingly, tramuatizingly bad movie, then this is the one for you!