Splice (2010)

Vincenzo Natali's Splice arrives from 2010, a year when a science fiction horror film could still be about two scientists in a lab doing something unwise with DNA and suffer no greater ideological burden than explaining itself. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play Clive and Elsa, genetic engineers at a company called N.E.R.D., who splice human and animal material into a winged chimera named Dren. The film is grim, damp, and committed to its own unpleasantness. It wants to shock us and largely does, though the shocks are of the old-fashioned biological variety: stinger tails, amphibious gills, and a final act that curdles into assault. Nobody in the cast is there to check a box, and the film makes no comment on the fact.

Elsa is the more interesting half of the pair, a competent scientist whose ambivalence about motherhood drives the plot well before the creature does. This is character work, not a thesis, and the film never stops to explain what it thinks about women in science. It simply lets her be difficult. The creature's body is treated as monstrous throughout, which forecloses any warmer reading of physical difference. There is no representation to speak of, no racial dimension, no ecology, no neurodivergence, no historical argument. Instead the film has a laboratory and a bad idea.

The corporate material is the closest thing to a message. N.E.R.D. exists to patent what it did not create, and Joan eventually offers the pregnant Elsa a sum of money to finish the job. That is a mild jab at institutional appetite, delivered without a speech. The bioethics arrive as horror beats, not sermons, and the film trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions. It is a monster movie with a lab coat, and it seems content to remain one.