Spring

Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead – 2015 – USA

Unfortunately, this is the kind of film that can only be marketed as “horror,” even though it really isn’t, and will therefore end up disappointing or (on message boards) enraging viewers who feel they’d been misled.  It’s not a tragedy of epic proportions but it’s just sad that this far into the 21st century, the strict categorization of movies by genre doesn’t seem to have loosened up at all.  Of course, regardless of marketing tactics, it is the consumer’s obligation to do his homework and – ideally – to be open to whatever the film has to offer instead of blaming it for his own confusion.  Spring is not jaw-droppingly original but I found it an enjoyable and unexpectedly romantic supernatural thriller.  It likely only found backing thanks to the popularity of junk like Twilight, but it is markedly more involving thanks to its quality of acting, its locations and its historical/mythological roots.  Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) is an anti-social 20-something American eager to leave town after his mother’s death and a scrape with the law, and on a whim buys a plane ticket to Italy, where circumstances deposit him in the small town of Polignano a Mare.  There he meets Louise (Nadia Hilker) who is quirky, pretty and flirtatious in the way that male travelers always hope the women they meet will be; i.e. too good to be true.  We gradually learn that she is some kind of thousands-of-years-old nature deity who is barely maintaining her human appearance through regular serum injections.  Aside from the fact that Evan accepts all of this with improbable composure, what’s a little refreshing about the film is that it proceeds with a natural kind of emotion and logic that is relevant to the characters instead of the demands of a cookie-cutter horror plot.  The element of humor was a big risk in a film like this that’s not an all-out comedy, and I applaud the filmmakers for taking the risk because it works.  It’s just enough to be endearing but not so much that it gets annoying.  The film never loses sight of its essential situation, which is two complicated people making their best efforts to relate to each other.