Krispr opens by making a philosophical decision and moving on. Clones are alive. They are just not human. The film announces this and immediately starts the story, which I appreciated, because we have all sat through the twenty-minute version of that argument in other science fiction films, and it rarely goes anywhere new.
What comes next is one of the stranger domestic setups in recent horror memory. A man’s wife walks into the bedroom and finds him with a naked woman. The naked woman is a clone he built in secret from his wife’s DNA over the course of a decade. He has been working on her, alone, without once mentioning it, for ten years.
Great start.
The Part Where It Is Accidentally a Comedy
The first act of Krispr plays less like a psychological thriller than like a screwball comedy directed by someone who does not fully realize it yet. The clone, at this point in her development, has the intelligence of a very attentive dog. She does not know what sleep is. She does not know what food is. There is a scene where the husband and wife are sitting across from this fully grown woman trying to explain these concepts with straight faces, and it is genuinely funny in a way I do not think director Petrie Willink was necessarily aiming for.
The wife’s solution is the one every exhausted stepparent has arrived at independently. She puts the unwanted presence in front of the television. The genre has been using this move for decades. The outsider learns humanity from a screen, absorbs its best and worst in equal measure, and something gets born that nobody planned for. Krispr does not reinvent this, but it commits to it with enough specificity that it still lands. The television segment is where the film starts laying its real groundwork, and you can feel it shifting gears.
At minute twelve, the plot essentially hands you the rest of the film on a plate. Here is where this is going. Here is who is going to get hurt. The film trusts you to know the destination and still enjoy the drive, which is a reasonable gamble.
Minute Thirty-Two
The screwball phase ends. It ends with purpose and without warning, and what replaces it is meaner and stranger and more interesting. The cinematography, which was doing solid work before, starts doing better work. The cast, who were handling comedy with competent professionalism, shifts into something closer to actual dread.
There is also a moment in the second act where a hammer gets introduced into the environment in a way that no one watching a horror film is going to mistake for set dressing. I appreciated this. It is not subtle. The film is not trying to be subtle about it.
The husband, for his part, continues being the most comprehensively unethical scientist in recent cinematic memory. He brings his breastfeeding sister experimental drugs as a Christmas gift. Then he is genuinely baffled when guests at a party take issue with him bringing his lab experiment as his plus-one. He holds contradictory positions, that Krispr is his greatest scientific achievement and also something like his child, simultaneously, without apparent awareness of what either of those framings implies about the other.
The Script Problem
The film is two hours long. It does not need to be two hours long. There is a ninety-minute version of Krispr somewhere inside this cut that probably hits cleaner and harder, and the experience of watching the release version is occasionally the experience of watching someone hesitate before sentences they should have cut. The performances are solid. The cinematography earns its keep throughout. The script is the thing that keeps slipping.
By the midpoint, the plot arrives at the place it was always headed: Krispr wants the wife gone. She wants the husband. This is treated, by the husband, as a shocking development. It is not a shocking development. She is built from the wife’s DNA. She learned everything she knows about love and marriage and what a husband is supposed to feel like from the inside of this specific house, watching this specific marriage. Her motivations make complete and depressing sense. The film understands this. The husband does not. This gap, between what the film sees and what the character refuses to, is actually where Krispr is most interesting.
What Willink Got Right
More than you might expect given everything above. The tonal pivot works. The cast does genuinely good work under a script that gives them less than they deserve. The cinematography stays committed through the whole runtime. And the film’s central argument, that the horror of Krispr is fundamentally a horror of male entitlement dressed up as a science fiction ethical question, lands clearly by the third act.
Krispr is not a good film in the way a well-oiled machine is a good machine. It is good in the way a first feature by someone who knows exactly what they want to say is good, which means it is sometimes clumsy about how it says it, but the thing being said is real. I enjoyed it more than its IMDB rating suggested I would. I walked out slightly annoyed at a fictional man, which is honestly what this film was going for.
The clone did nothing wrong.
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