With Craig Venter’s recent creation of a synthetic life form, now would be the perfect time to release a film that engages the public in intelligent debate about the ethical implications of meddling with life’s generative processes. Splice is not that film. It certainly has pretensions, but it’s fatally undermined by its inability to make its mind up about what kind of film – moral drama, horror, comedy SF – it wants to be.  

Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are hotshot scientists who splice together different animals’ DNA to make mutants. But the evil pharmacy company that funds their research forbids the use of human DNA in their experiments and so they go rogue, building an animal-human hybrid in secret. ‘Dren’ turns out to be basically a human baby with wings and a tail stuck on; conveniently, she also ages quickly. As she grows, the situation becomes complicated, and not just by the increasing difficulty of keeping her a secret: Elsa treats her as a substitute for the baby she’s too scared to have, and Clive has sex with her just as soon as she’s adult-sized. And then it turns out she isn’t so human after all...

Dren is a lazily-imagined Frankenstein remarkable only for reading my mind halfway through the film and spelling out the word “tedious” with some Scrabble tiles. There seems to be an almost wilful refusal in this movie to allow the build-up of any kind of tension. We do not feel the net draw in on the scientific renegades, or a growing sense that a mutant's escape will lead to the downfall of all humanity; no, we have to just sit and watch this hateful couple raise their boring baby. Presumably we’re supposed to be pondering their various moral dilemmas, but these are raised in a manner so trite and superficial, and within such a ludicrous storyline, that it’s impossible to take them seriously. Finally, just when your last flicker of interest in the characters has been extinguished, we jolt into horror movie mode with a few half-hearted chase sequences through a scary forest, and the seed for the sequel is sown. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to term.