There is a moment near the end of Splice when you see the creature in all its frightening glory, this odd hybrid with just enough human to have won your empathy for the majority of the film, and it is about to exact its revenge for mistreatment, when you finally understand what Mary Shelley was trying to tell us in the 19th century: Playing God is a bad idea.
Vincenzo Natali is one of Canada’s great unsung science fiction filmmakers. His films such as Cube and Nothing are an odd yet entertaining and thought-provoking mix of comedy and terror, and probably because he’s Canadian, Natali looks at one of the most controversial topics in the scientific community, human cloning, and creates an intimate science fiction horror film. Indeed, the larger politics and almost expected scenes with protestors screaming about God and the Bible on Parliament Hill, or great debates between scientists and politicians (which one might see in a Hollywood film) are missing. Natali takes the politics to the family level, focusing on the creators and their strange creation. It is this kind of intimacy that is necessary in order to understand an issue as large as cloning. (For the literary version, I recommend Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which also achieves this kind of intimacy.) This is certainly his most gorgeous looking film to date, and by forgoing the usual cheap thrills of monster films and often over-the-top Hollywood-style science fiction films that rarely question the status quo and instead make completely unbelievable works, Splice asks the truly hard questions about the future of science and how it will change what it means to be human. It’s Natali’s best work since Cube.
