Sarah Polley Calls Splice a "Freudian Nightmare"
Posted 01.25.10 by Bill
What happens when after a couple of ambitious young scientists throw caution — and ethics — to the winds and create the world's first animal-human hybrid? Splice, which debuted at Sundance this weekend, aims to show you the answer. And ultimately, it is the stuff of nightmares, with one early review by the horror aficionados over at FEARnet calling the movie "a true Frankenstein tale for the modern age."
The story is not so easy to pigeonhole though, says Sarah Polley, who plays one of the not-so-cautious scientists, in an interview with AICN:
… it's kind of a bit of everything. I think if you go in expecting a horror film, that’s not what you are going to get. If you expect sci-fi, it's not totally what you are going to get, but it's kind of a mix of a lot of different things and also I think just pulls off this very specific relationship, both between a couple and also their "child."
You see all the stages of parenthood played out in an extremely short space and time in their most nightmarish version. I guess it's kind of a Freudian nightmare and it's also got these horror elements and these sci-fi elements and stuff.
And, she adds, her character is complicated as well:
I play Elsa, who is an extremely ambitious, energetic, dynamic, and playful woman who loves to milk every second out of life. She’s also a little bit terrifying, because she is really manipulative and controlling. She wants to get what she wants and she usually does. I don’t think I have ever wanted to play a character as much as this one. She is so complicated and lovable, but totally messed up.
There is a suitably terrifying creature of course, played, in its adult form, by Delphine Chaneac. But when asked how scary the creature is, Polley insists that in this movie, it is not so much the creature, but the people that are truly scary.