Critics were split. Roger Ebert gave the film a rare zero-star review, calling it "sick." Meanwhile, The New York Times called it "a brilliant, queasy provocation."
Perhaps they should have dismantled the experiment then. They did not. The grant timelines had teeth; the donor's expectations had a warm pressure. They rationalized the observation as emergent patterning, an intelligence that needed only to be described, not feared. --Splice-2009----