3 out of 5

Directed by: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

I was so entranced by Spring that, while viewing, I made a big Impatience no-no and looked up some reviews.  Simon Abrams and I don’t always agree, but I find his opinion generally well-written, and having some sense of his tastes I was surprised, given what I’d seen so far, that he was overall unimpressed by the movie.  Now, it’s possible that what I read ended up influencing how I felt, but I’m pretty schooled in dismissing all takes but my (obviously superior) own, so I think that it was just coincidental that as soon as I returned to the movie, it hit the turn he was mentioning, and I immediately so what he was saying.  My reaction was maybe even more volatile, and if you’d stopped to ask my take at just at that point, I would’ve told you the movie was a piece of dump.  It sincerely spends most of its final 30 minutes trashing what it’d patiently and, frankly, quite beautifully / unnervingly established; it’s only by convincing yourself that it’s a different film from there on it that it can be redeemed.  Some sense of the entrancement returns in the final seconds of dialogue and filming, although all of the horror and tension has filtered out by that point, and thus the resolution, which you’ve sussed out by that point, falls rather flat.

But: I’m trying to remain reasonable.  The first half of the film is majestically handled, and sweeps you from crass characterizations in Florida backwaters, Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) reeling about from the death of his mother, to Italy – where Evan backpacks to get away from it all – to skillful handling of discovery of self and life and love as he gets wrapped up with femme fatale Louise (Nadia Hilker).  Helmed by the dudes who gave us the trashy Bonestorm segment of the vile V/H/S: Viral, we should be expecting a lot of the dude-bro nonsense the Florida segment supposes, but there’s a realistic sweetness even there, as Evan hangs with his stoned buddy and tries to get laid.  Sweetness is certainly the wrong word, but Pucci gives Evan such a human side you can’t help but see him as such (see aspects of yourself, or people you’ve known), and the appreciably soft but raw cinematography and focused framing keep the film from drifting off into indie aloofishness.  And once Evan is isolated moreso in a foreign land, these elements get to flourish.  Benson and Moorhead finds continually intriguing ways to shoot the city, and smartly keep things to a few locales which begin to become familiar, also avoiding the penchant for stuff like this to act like travelogues.  Louise is cornered into something of a Perfect Girl role, but as Pucci elevates Evan, Hilker does the same with Louise: this is a girl in part playing a role, in part feeling like she’s actually better than those around her.  In other words, for both of our characters, stumbling into a relationship, the script seems to know that they’re full of a little shit, which keeps it humble.

Then there are those horror elements.  We get quick cuts of something happening to Louise; horrid, confusing transformations.  The mythology is confusing as hell, but the way the scenes are spliced in keeps it riveting.  We’re enjoying the chemistry; we’re nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It’s masterful.

…Until it does drop, and with a loud clunk.  The effects are cool, but the plot transition feels like a shrug, and then exposition is jammed down our throats as quickly as possible to set up the final third of the movie… which is a fucking comedy buddy roadtrip film.  There are gags in the final third that were set up, previously, as horror stings.  It’s tragic.

Again, shake your head, try to view that section as its own thing, and you can survive.  It’s still well made, it’s just no longer connecting emotionally, and nowhere near as rich as the roundabout meet cute we’d witnessed.  What’s further disappointing is the explanation the flick speeds through is actually fairly interesting, and could have served an entirely different film more focused on developing that…  To quote Evan, the attempted combination of genres – horror and love story – results in “some indie bullshit.”

I was obviously upset by this ill-affected changeover, but it didn’t make me want to stop watching the movie.  And I have to give credit for getting so invested in the first portion.  So because we don’t do half stars here, or .75 stars, or something that would indicate that I’m grudgingly allotting three stars, it’s also not a two star flick, and I liked more than I disliked.  So there.