Spring (2014)

(On Cable TV, December 2021) There’s an intriguing mixture of genres at play in Spring, as a young man’s romantic holiday becomes something much stranger along the way. It begins in depressingly gritty dramatic territory, as our protagonist buries his long-suffering mother and finds himself eager to get out of town. Once on the shores of the Mediterranean, the film shifts in romantic mode as he meets a very strange young woman who seems to harbour a deep secret. That discovery lands us in horror territory, but what sets Spring apart from countless other femmes fatales of horror vintage is that it doesn’t stop there — it keeps going further in its premise, bringing the film close to a science-fictional examination of an extraordinary but still plausible premise. But Spring is not done yet — the climactic suspense of the film is to see whether it’s going to land in horror or romance, and while the answer is unsatisfying, it’s not quite so simple as what other genre films would have chosen. You can certainly argue that the script is slightly better than the low-budget execution, and that there are maybe one or two less-essential subplots to slow things down. Still, writers-directors-producers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead do rather well with a limited budget, and pack a few shocks along the way. Lou Taylor Pucci is fine in the lead role, but it’s Nadia Hilker who has the more difficult role as a flirty/mysterious/preoccupied young woman who’s really something else. Some nice Italian scenery completes the package for a surprisingly engaging film. Spring is probably not the film you expect, and that’s quite a relief in a landscape of intensely formulaic horror films that would all have gone in a very predictable direction.