Sexually attracted to Dren, Clive at first reacts to his own feelings with shock and horror. Her bare breasts get lots of camera time when Elsa cuts her dress off to perform a gruesomely violent procedure on her. Clive notices her watching, but doesn’t stop.ĭren may be part animal, but her appearance is all human from the knees up.
We see her gyrate on top of him-as does Dren, who watches the copulating couple through a gauzy curtain. While mostly clothed, Clive and Elsa have sex on a couch. Clive has some similarly tender moments with Dren, such as when he tries to teach her to dance and calms her by saying he loves her.
Elsa also puts makeup on Dren as she becomes more and more human looking. Elsa gives Dren a Barbie doll that Elsa’s own mother had forbidden her to play with. She uses Scrabble letters to teach Dren to communicate, for instance, and at times tenderly cares for Dren’s needs. Trying to overcome her own flawed genetic heritage, however, Elsa works hard (when she’s not losing her temper) to be a good “mother” to Dren. “This is the disaster everyone worries about,” Clive says, “a new species set loose in the world.” And when Clive makes an insanely immoral choice later on, Elsa scolds harshly, “There are some things we do not do.”Īs the film progresses, Elsa becomes more and more emotionally unhinged, and we learn that her mother was insane and emotionally abusive. In the end, however, the film strongly suggests that such rationalizations are arrogant and foolish.īoth Clive and Elsa have fleeting moments of clarity in which they try to convince each other that they’ve crossed taboo boundaries. When things go unimaginably wrong with Dren-in ways that Clive and Elsa scarcely could have foreseen-the message the film delivers is unequivocal: The unintended consequences of genetic manipulation are beyond anyone’s ability to predict.Įarly on, Elsa rationalizes her desire to combine human DNA with that of animals by telling Clive to consider all the diseases-Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, cancer-that their research might cure. With Dren’s changes, Clive and Elsa soon realize, come more questions … the kind of questions that come after you’ve blown the lid off Pandora’s genetic box without considering what comes next. Never mind her retractable wings, ape-like agility, extra leg joint and ability to breathe underwater. Meanwhile, Dren matures into something like a beautiful young woman. That buys them some time to figure out what happens next. So Clive and Elsa whisk Dren out of the lab to a deserted farm once owned by Elsa’s mother. With each passing day, Dren looks more human.
But he doesn’t stop her.Īt first, Dren-conceived and incubated in an artificial womb-looks like the fusion of a kangaroo, a mole and a dinosaur. Like this tantalizing extrapolation: What if we spliced human DNA? Clive questions the ethics of his girlfriend’s reckless suggestion. Until the pharmaceutical company bankrolling them says it’s content to extract one special protein from Clive and Elsa’s creations and call it a day. And they’re just getting started, they think. That’s the question Clive and Elsa (romantic partners as well as scientific peers) have answered in the forms of Fred and Ginger, the slug-like results of their genetic-engineering experiments. Or, in the case of genetic researchers Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast, what if we spliced DNA from different animals and created a life-form the world has never seen?
What if mold could be used to treat disease? What if we split the atom? What if we went to the moon? But it’s the question every world-shaking scientific discovery has been predicated upon. It’s a simple question, made up of two insignificant words.
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