Scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) take their DNA experiments into a dangerous realm in the thriller Splice. (E1 Films)

Hatched in the spooky recesses of director Vincenzo Natali’s mind, Splice offers Canadian audiences something to crow about: a clever, homegrown monster mash-up that keeps morphing before your eyes. Part sci-fi, part gross-out horror with a dash of family drama thrown in for good measure, the movie is a complete hoot in all of its slithery forms.

Splice is a clever, homegrown monster mash-up that keeps morphing before your eyes.

Splice begins in a dark, dank lab, where pioneering genetic engineers Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are witnessing the birth of their latest creation, a slimy, shuddering worm named Fred. The product of spliced livestock genes, Fred and his predecessor, Ginger, should be enough to guarantee more funding for the married scientists to continue their innovative medical research. But the corporate backers at Newstead Pharma take one look at Elsa and Clive’s grotesque test results and relegate the hotshots to five more years of dry “phase two” legwork.

Elsa and Clive aren’t content to sift through pig proteins when they could be curing cancer. If their Bride of Frankenstein names didn’t tip you off, they are soon conducting their own top-secret experiment, this time fusing animal and human DNA. Before Elsa can say “It’s alive!” a new creature plops out on the lab floor, swathed in gelatinous goo. Sporting chicken legs, a rabbit face and a head as phallic as anything in the Alien movies, the bouncing little tyke proves capable of rapid-fire growth spurts. Within a matter of months, the lumpen-headed mass has evolved into a little girl named Dren (Abigail Chu), and then a hell-raising adolescent (Delphine Chanéac) who possesses the beauty of Sinead O’Connor and a lethally spiky tail.

With its moody London Philharmonic score and sci-fi set-up, Splice has all the makings of an old-fashioned B-movie, the kind where characters suffer horrific consequences after messing with nature. But Natali and co-writers Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor are not content to stay in pop-corny territory for long. Once Dren is unearthed, Splice begins to resemble David Cronenberg’s triumphant remake of The Fly (1986), or his earlier Freudian family headtrip, The Brood (1979).

When the kindergarten-aged Dren starts spelling out human words with Scrabble tiles, Elsa’s previously absent maternal genes kick in, and the film mutates once more, this time into something slyly funny. Clive’s ethical concerns about the Barbie-toting creature don’t stand a chance once beaming, proud mother Elsa wonders aloud if anyone could really look at Dren’s face “and see anything less than a miracle.”

Clive listens to the half-human, half-animal Dren (Delphine Chaneac) in Splice. (E1 Films)

The driven, tightly wound Elsa and Clive prove ill-equipped as parents, and as they hole up in an abandoned farmhouse to keep their rebellious teen offspring under wraps, Splice heads into icky terrain that should shock audiences and inspire someone’s film-school master’s thesis. Splice is teeming with gender-bending creatures, disturbing sex and enough suggestive, oozing body imagery to give H.R. Giger’s alien a run for its money. No Freudian textbooks are necessary, however; the movie invites many readings – from timely genetics debate to a study of the world’s most dysfunctional family – all of them accessible, smart and fun to ponder afterward.

Howard Berger’s excellent makeup effects and the game A-list cast members give Splice a slickness that makes you forget it was shot on a relatively modest budget (roughly $30 million). Brody makes Clive a fully convincing brainiac, but Polley does particularly fine work as Elsa, creating a complex heroine who’s quite fierce and monstrous in her own right.

Splice is an extremely genre-savvy genre movie, and it eventually becomes so hell-bent on delivering new surprises that it fumbles a bit in its climactic scenes. The twists keep coming, but by the end, some of them feel like they belong in a trashier, far more conventional horror movie.

Still, this movie is agile enough that you’ll feel compelled to stick with it. After years of abortive searches for more mainstream material, Telefilm should pat itself on the back for funding this risky project. Splice is dark, to be sure, but it’s also creepy good fun and certainly the liveliest multiplex-bound movie I’ve seen this season. Splice’s experimentation pays off, and something tells me this tiny CanCon movie could mutate into a big fat hit.

Splice opens June 4.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.