Main cast: Lou Taylor Pucci (Evan Russell) and Nadia Hilker (Louise)
Directors: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Spring is considered a body horror film by many, but it’s actually closer to a romantic drama that just happens to have a female lead character that isn’t entirely human. Oh, she kills some people now and then, but the main thrust of the story, ahem, is Louise’s relationship with the American lad in Italy, Evan Russell.
Like many movies that fancy themselves to arty-farty types, this one follows a very familiar formula. Evan loses his mother to cancer and starts going adrift when it comes to his life. His girlfriend puts him on a time-out, and he gets into fight with customers at the restaurant where he works at. Eventually, he takes a trip to Italy, and as movies like this go, wastes little time meeting and starting to fall for the exotic native in the exotic land. Despite him looking ordinary and having little to offer, Louise has sex with him and it’s true love… or so it seems.
If this had been a drama, our hero will have an affair that restores his mojo, and he will return to America full of vim and vigor again, having learned important life lessons in the honey pot of an exotic beauty in a faraway land. He will then write a book on his affair that would win a Pulitzer prize and catapult him into being a tortured author with a scruffy beard, spending the rest of the movie pontificating about the painful thorn that is love, embedded in his heart and slowly killing him inside even as he shags his way through a bevy of women to assuage the pain in his tormented heart. Then, as the movie rolls into its final ten minutes, his latest girlfriend will find him dead in his bed, a bottle in one hand and an unfinished letter to his love in that exotic land crumpled in the other.
Fortunately, Spring is a horror film, so it’s about Louise pontificating about the nature of her being that forces her to do nasty things to stay alive, and acting all “I don’t love you! I can’t love you!” towards Evan. Evan, of course, is dogged in his affections and attention, and we all know he’s going to wear down her defenses eventually. Can his benevolent, wholesome, American pee-pee open Louise’s, er, heart to love?
Then the people behind this movie remembers that all arty movies need a bad ending to lend themselves an artistic credibility that will hopefully win them an award or two in film festivals, so they tack on a last-minute “Ha, ha, here is an ironic bad ending!” movie-ender of a scene.
Spring is pretty much every “American tourist in Europe shagging a hot local and somehow finding the meaning of life in the process” movie that wraps its banal, vapid premise with pretensions of artistry. It’s far more formulaic than it pretends to be, and adding in body horror elements won’t change that. It doesn’t even have the decency to be a better love story, probably terrified of being taken less seriously if it chose to do that. At the very least, pick a lead actor that is hot, so that I can get some eye candy while having to sit through this pretentious waffle of a film.
