"I'd still like to grab coffee or something, sometime. Because I think you're the most attractive person I've ever seen. But that doesn't outweigh that you might be a mental patient and I gotta make sure that you're the kind of crazy I can deal with." - Evan
Evan (Pucci) is a mid-twenty-something that life has handed one disaster after another. The opening scene sees him at his mother's deathbed, as she wastes away from cancer. It is later revealed that his father died a few years earlier from heart failure and that Even had to leave college to take care of his mom. On the night of her funeral, he gets into a fight in the bar he works at and is fired. The guy he beat up files charges and the police are after Evan. He leaves the US, picking Italy at random. He winds up at a sea-side town, Polignano a Mare, where he catches the eye of Louise. After some flirtation, the two form a quick and intimate bond. However, Louise is not what she seems. Evan discovers she has a horrific secret. Will love win out in the end?
"I am not a sociopath, okay? I just have really bad luck." - Louise
Spring takes some of the tropes of the star-crossed lovers/meet-cute instant romance and gives them a nice twist. The girl has secret, but it's not that she used to be fat or is really a secretary and not a princess or has a controlling family; it's that she is an immortal mutant, whose genetic code runs riot every couple of decades and she spawns teeth and tentacles. Evan is a little closer to a stereotype; however, Pucci makes him very appealing. It was a good idea to have him spend some screen-time first with his drunk, druggie friend Tommy (Jeremy Gardner) and then, when he gets to Italy, two English versions of Tommy and then juxtaposes those relationships with that of an elderly farmer, Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti), who hires Evan as a farmhand when he arrives in Polignano. We get to see the effects that life's challenges have had on Evan when he's with the "lads," but also his more inquisitive, sensitive side when he is with Angelo, without his character ever slipping into some unrealistic sappiness.
The film looks beautiful. The moment when Evan and Louise first see each other in the tight confines of the town square is masterful. Shot in slow motion, with Louise in a seductive red dress and Evan emerging from shadows into sunlight as he turns to watch he walk away sets the stage for the relationship to come. Dream-like, hinting at the flirtatious and difficult nature of Louise (after all, she makes eye contact and then walks away from him) and sets her up as something of a predator. The early creature scenes are effective, although the limits of the CG show near the end, when we see a bit too much of Louise transformed into some kind of fish/squid.
As a Lovecraft fan, I also appreciated the nods to his work (and the work of subsequent authors in the Cthulhu-mythos). Louise is kind of a hot shuggoth or an offspring Ubbo-Sathla. If you don't know what that is, don't worry; it just means you're not an ubergeek like me. The idea of an inbred and not quite human population is something shows up time and again in Lovecraftian stories. And the visual tone, at least initially, would fit a mythos story with partially glimpsed weirdness and visual tone that instills a sense of unease in the viewer.
There are problems with the film. It goes a little longer than the story warranted. The last act, which is heavy on unnecessary backstory, could have been tightened up. The over-explanation of Louise's power actually makes it more confusing. Why is she sprouting tentacles at one point and wolf-like features at another? Is Louise (and others like her) the source of our mythology of werewolves, vampires, succubi, etc? Why does she sometimes look like a rotting corpse? Why even bother with the nonsensical exposition about embryonic and adult stem cells? None of this last minute exposition ruins the film; but it is unnecessary and needlessly complicates the dark fairy tale tone the film established. There's also a last minute red herring - Evan is suddenly being pursued by the police for a visa violation - that goes no where. And ending, in which Louise chooses Evan over immortality, is never in doubt.
These problems are minor compared to everything the creative team did right. Spring is a great film and one that any fan of horror films or even off-beat romances needs to see.
Highly recommended.
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