The ‘Splice’ Sex Scene: Never Forget!

Game of Thrones has made incest passé. Going into the upcoming final season, one of the biggest questions is what’s going to happen to the series’ two incestous couples? The twins with benefits, Jaime and Cersei, are on the outs, and Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen don’t know that they’re nephew and aunt yet. But, if GoT has made pop culture weirdly chill with on-screen incest, HBO added a new movie to its streaming library this month that should counteract that, because Splice goes even further in the most bizarre, least-sexy sex scene in film history.

Splice, a 2009 sci-fi horror, stars Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as geneticists who play god and suffer for it. The couple are busy splicing animal DNA together to creating hybrid creatures that their employers can extract specialized proteins from for medical purposes, but they’re more ambitious than that. Clive (Brody) and Elsa (Polley) want to make a human-animal hybrid, arguing that such a creature would be a groundbreaking scientific breakthrough. When their employers (rightfully) forbid them for pursuing this ethical travesty, Clive and Elsa do it anyway, creating a hybrid young girl they name Dren.

As she reaches adolescence, Dren looks human-ish, and that’s what’s so disturbing. Her eyes are a little far apart, she’s totally hairless (actress Delphine Chanéac shaved her head for the role), and she sports a slender tail and digitigrade legs. Eventually, she’ll display gills, wings, and a venomous stronger, but her base form is human-adjacent. She also thinks and acts like a young human girl — mostly. Clive and Elsa notice that she’s maturing awfully fast, and the Elsa begins to treat Dren as her daughter.

Turns out there’s a reason for that, because Elsa actually used her own DNA to create Dren. But, while Elsa and Dren have a warped mother-daughter bond, Clive and Dren are forming another sort of relationship, and when they consummate it, Splice fully becomes buck-wild.

The sex scene is not on YouTube, though it has been, upsettingly, uploaded to several seedy porn websites. That’s almost understandable, as in many ways it’s filmed with all the passionate eroticism of a normal sex scene, and the parts of Dren that aren’t, you know, animalistic, could be considered to be conventionally attractive. That little familiarity just creates a paralyzing cognitive dissonance because of how everything else that’s happening is deeply, deeply wrong.

In this one sex scene, you’ve got bestiality, because Dren is part animal. She’s also underage, given the accelerated maturation. Clive had been raising her as a daughter, and she actually is genetically descended from Elsa, who Clive had been involved with, so there’s an upsetting incestual aspect to the sex, too. It’s also unclear how mentally developed Dren is, so there’s a possible consent issue. Dren attempts to covertly kill Clive mid-coitus, but attempted murder seems paltry at this point. Finally, the scene concludes with good old-fashioned cringe-worthy awkwardness, because Elsa walks in on the pair in the act.

It’s a dumbfounding scene, an assault of so many taboos that it’s overwhelming. But, Splice isn’t done yet. In the climatic scene, Dren uses some of her animal DNA to display sequential hermaphroditism, as she spontaneously changes sex to become a male. Now much more aggressive, Dren rapes Elsa. This scene, thankfully, does not contain any erotic elements, as it’s played for pure horror, and it truly is disturbing. Everything that was wrong with the first sex scene between Clive and Dren is here too, only with the added horrors of rape and even more direct incest. And, the film ends with Dren dead, but Elsa pregnant with its baby, agreeing to carry the creature to term in the name of science in exchange for a massive check.

If a good movie should elicit a strong emotional reaction from a viewer —and abject disgust counts on that front— then Splice is a success. It takes the tropes and themes of Frankenstein — scientists toying with forces they can’t control — and makes them upsettingly carnal. If you’re looking for a smart sci-fi film that’s challenging on a lot of levels, Splice will deliver. If you squirmed while watching Jon Snow and Daenerys hook up on a boat during the last Game of Thrones finale, maybe sit this HBO offering out.

James Grebey is a pop culture journalist who writes for Syfy Wire, GQ, Billboard, Rotten Tomatoes, The Columbia Journalism Review, and more. Find more of his work at those places, or check out his dump photoshop jokes on Twitter.

Where to stream Splice