Max's sci-fi horror film goes R-rated all the way, a clever and disturbing body nightmare

The author Jonathan Klotz
| Published 29 seconds ago

Since the first science fiction story, science fiction and horror have overlapped, Frankensteinsurprised readers with an amoral scientist and his attempts to create life. More than two hundred years later, scientists taking their experiments too far is still a constant trope in science fiction, including the 2009 box office bomb that pushed the envelope a little too far, according to most critics. ConnectionThe small-scale story of two scientists who raise a human-animal hybrid is riddled with discussions of scientific ethics before, as always, all hell breaks loose.

Scientists play God

Scientists Clive and Elsa, played by Academy Award winners Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley respectively, manage to create two amorphous beings named Fred and Ethel to prove that their genetic research is on the right track. Quietly, without notifying their superiors, the two manage to form Dren, named after a young man saw their shirts with the word “NERD” on them and wrote it backwards. It's a sweet moment, and the new Dren is one of the highlights Connectionbut if the experiments always went right, nobody would ever be interested in anybody science fiction movie.

Connection It takes place mostly on an abandoned farm, where Clive and Elsa can raise Dren away from prying eyes, and also save money on the budget, since it's safe to say that most of the effort went into the animal-human hybrid. Drena rapidly ages into a “teenager” where she is played by French ballerina Delphine Chanek, who does a fantastic job of conveying Drena's emotions without saying a word.

Compared to more classic versions of body horror, of the many works David Cronenberg to the latest Substance, Connection not as disturbing, not in the classic “ick” way you might expect. Instead, the film turns Dren into a strange hybrid who is attractive and clearly capable of emotion with his large anime-style eyes, so the horror comes from realizing that this obviously unnatural being is intelligent, capable of higher levels of thought. , is the product of an illegal experiment.

A slow burn that ignites

The film gets a lot of mileage out of the characters discussing the ethics of scientific research, what counts as intelligent life, and where Drena fits into the world now that she's here. That part of Connection is well done, and the constant scenes of dialogue and debate are engaging and thoughtful. This makes the wild last-minute third-act sequence all the more horrifying when it arrives, and completely changes the tone of the film to pure horror.

Even with the twists and turns ending, Connection became a critical hit, even earning praise from Roger Ebert, but was largely ignored at the box office. On a $30 million budget, the film grossed $28 million, and while the marketing budget was very small, it didn't even recoup its production budget, relying on DVD and Blu-Ray releases to help the film turn a modest profit. A dialogue-heavy sci-fi drama that turns into body horror isn't an easy sell, and while the film has attracted a small audience, it's not yet at that level of cult classic, and now, 15 years after its release, this ship. has sailed.

You can experience Connection and judge for yourself to Max. Just be warned, there are certain moments and images from the movie that burn into your brain the moment you see them, and no matter what you do, they'll be hard to forget. Don't let the opening 15 minutes fool you; it earns that R rating by going from 0 to 100 in the span of 5 seconds once the final act begins.