Delphine Cheneac on Splice

Delphine Cheneac's eyes are not on different sides of her head. Her head is not weirdly bisected like a yo-yo. Neither does she sport a whiplash tail with a deadly spike, nor odd, segmented, chicken-like legs. But the French actress and model, 31, with the help of some CGI and prosthetics, creates the most sympathetic and strangely sexy screen creature seen in many a year. "I didn't recognise myself when I saw the film for the first time," she volunteers. "It was a like a dream."

Chenéac is chatting happily on the phone from Paris in heavily accented English about the challenges of playing a genetically engineered creature in Splice, the new psycho-sexual sci-fi shocker from director Vincenzo Natali. "There are so many messages in this movie," she says. "It's about violence, childhood, loneliness, DNA. And it's a love story too. And about the relation between parents and kids. When I first read it I thought, wow - so many subjects."

Chenéac's co-stars are Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, as Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast – bioengineering's it-couple, who are creating new forms of life for a corporate giant. When the plug is pulled on a project involving human DNA, the two proceed with the experiment in secret. The result is Dren - a creature that grows unnaturally fast from a squawking, puking, birdlike thing into a majestic, highly intelligent and very dangerous girl.

You may think you've heard this story before - in Species (1995), for instance. But Natali, whose scary debut feature Cube was a marvel of inventive low-budget scripting (it was shot in one room), has taken the Frankenstein myth in creepy, satirical new directions. Clive and Elsa vacillate between thinking of Dren as their child and as an experiment that can be terminated at any time. The monster, meanwhile, is torn between love and loathing for its creators. The ethics of gene splicing haven't been explored quite so viscerally before.

"I think I'm fascinated by the monster that lurks within each of us," explains Natali. "And in Splice, the people who made this creature are ultimately more frightening than the creature itself - even more so, because they seem like nice, decent people."

For the role of the adult creature Natali says he sought an androgynous actress with physical presence and endurance. "I would like both men and women in the audience to be attracted to Dren and to feel somewhat guilty about it," he says.

Chenéac, remarkably, was the first actress to audition for the part. Landing it was a relief for a performer who has often found herself between two stools. "I ended up in movies very young but then I didn't work for a very long time because my face was so young and my voice was so low - they didn't match. I get all the time strange characters, strange movies."

Strange barely cuts it for Splice - a movie exploring the ultimate in both deadbeat parents and monster children. Despite the suggestions of incest and child abuse, the film has found an unlikely advocate in Chenéac's mum. "My mother saw it twice! She was all day on Facebook writing ‘go, go, go see Splice.' She was better than a commercial." Nick Dent

Spliceopens in Australia on Thurs 12 Aug.

More films, film reviews, film festivals and special screenings in Sydney? Sign up for our weekly newsletter