Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
There’s a surprising amount of romance in the horror genre. Gothic films often have a strong romance element in them. In fact, when Dracula was released in 1931, it was advertised as the strangest passion the world has ever known. These days, we have Guillermo del Toro and the whole (pardon the expression) “monsterfucker” crowd, people who have an apparent fetish for monsters in one way or another. Enter Spring, a movie that starts as a romance, clearly becomes body horror, but stays a romance for the running time.
Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) watches his mother die from cancer, and days later, after her funeral, gets into a fight in the bar he works at. The man who incurred his wrath finds out where Evan lives and plans to press charges, and the fight costs Evan his job. While he doesn’t want to necessarily leave his friend Tommy (Jeremy Gardner), Evan decides that discretion is the better part of valor. He grabs his passport, heads to the airport, and hops on the first flight he can get out of the country, winding up in Italy.
Once in Italy, Evan goes roving with a few others but decides to put down some temporary roots in a small town in southern Italy. He takes a job on a farm, working with Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti) on an olive farm. Evan is essentially undocumented, though, which puts him at constant risk. Despite this, he finds himself attracted to Louise (Nadia Hilker), who acts oddly, but seems to be interested in him as well.
As the audience, we are going to see that things are not normal with Louise very quickly. After a night together, Louise starts showing signs of being either monstrous or alien. Not aware of this, Evan pursues her, looking for a reason to stay in Italy, mainly so he doesn’t end up back in Los Angeles where he is wanted for assault. The changes Louise is going through seem to be getting worse, and it’s also clear that she is reverting back to a normal human form with some kind of injection. So what exactly is going on? Who or what is Louise, and how does all of this affect Evan…and how much danger is he really in?
There is something very Lovecraftian here, which makes the romance angle of the film particularly interesting, since our boy H.P. wasn’t really known for that. There are some direct parallels here to a film like Dagon. There are also some really interesting body horror elements of this. These aren’t particularly disgusting or upsetting—you’re not likely to lose your lunch over what is on screen, but Louise’s transformations are interesting and absolutely worth seeing. They also appear to be mainly or entirely practical effects, which is always going to be superior to anything done CGI.
What’s surprising here is how well the romance works. In fact, the romance works so well that it becomes the major problem with the film. I will explain. We can’t go too long before Evan figures out that something very wrong is going on with Louise, and in one notable scene, he catches her while she is transforming and before she injects herself to stay human. Evan is remarkably calm about this after the initial shock. The fact that the woman that he is romancing is taking drugs to prevent her from essentially turning into a reptilian/octopus hybrid is something that he seems to take completely in stride.
But they genuinely work as a couple. Evan isn’t a very good person at the beginning of the film, but he becomes someone that we eventually care about. Louise, too, is aloof and weird as the film begins, but she becomes someone that we actually like spending time with. We want them to succeed as a couple, despite knowing what that would mean for Evan and what sacrifice it would be for Louise.
That, really, is what stops me from liking this more than I do. Evan has an inhuman amount of sang froid. It would be like finding out that your next door neighbor is actually from a planet orbiting Betelgeuse and having your reaction to that news be wondering if that made them lactose intolerant.
That said, I liked this quite a bit. There’s a lot here that feels like red herrings, but it works for this film, because all of that very much feels like it’s real life, like we are existing in the world with Evan, and people just come into and leave his life as a matter of course. We don’t see Tommy again after the first few minutes, and it’s okay—he doesn’t have to show up and get killed or anything. And honestly, and for a wonder, this is far more a romance with horror elements than it is a horror movie with a romance cobbled onto it. That, if nothing else, makes it noteworthy.
Why to watch Spring: The romance actually works pretty well.
Why not to watch: The weirdness is taken far too much in stride.
No comments:
Post a Comment