Spring: The Lovecraftian Romance on the Italian Coast

The shorthand that followed Spring around for a decade was “Before Sunrise meets Lovecraft”, and like most good shorthand it is accurate and slightly insulting. It captures the shape and misses the achievement. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s second feature premiered at Toronto in September 2014 and reached cinemas through Drafthouse the following year, and what makes it remarkable is that the romance is doing the heavy lifting. Plenty of horror films have a love story bolted to the chassis. This is a love story that a monster has been introduced into, written by people who were evidently more interested in whether two specific human beings should be together than in what happens when one of them changes shape.

Evan, played by Lou Taylor Pucci, has a bad month. His mother dies after a long illness, leaving him with no family at all; he gets into a fight at the bar where he works and loses the job and possibly his liberty; and so he does the thing people fantasise about and almost never do, which is to buy a flight to a country he has no connection to and leave. He ends up in a coastal town in Apulia, on the heel of Italy — Polignano a Mare, all white stone and cliffs over very blue water. He takes casual work on an old farmer’s land. And he meets Louise, played by Nadia Hilker, a graduate student in evolutionary genetics who is direct, funny, faintly cruel, and extremely uninterested in his company until she is not.

The walk-and-talk is genuine

The comparison to Linklater is earned rather than decorative, because Benson and Moorhead actually do the hard part. The film’s middle hour is two people walking around a beautiful town talking, and the dialogue is written well enough that you would watch it without a genre premise attached. Louise runs rings around Evan. She is more intelligent than he is, more experienced than he is by an order of magnitude he cannot yet perceive, and Hilker plays her with a wry, appraising warmth — the confidence of someone who has had this conversation before and is nonetheless enjoying it.

Pucci’s job is subtler and easy to undervalue. Evan is a grief case pretending to be a backpacker, and Pucci keeps the bereavement legible under everything — the slightly-too-quick laugh, the tendency to say true things at the wrong moment because he has stopped seeing the point of tact. The film’s most affecting exchanges are the ones where his lack of social armour turns out to be his only advantage: Louise is armoured against charm and has no defence at all against a man who has run out of the energy to perform.

Francesco Carnelutti holds the third corner as Angelo, the farmer Evan works for, and the character is more than colour. Angelo has buried a wife and has opinions about love that the film treats as authoritative rather than quaint, and Benson gives him the argument the picture is finally making. Every scene with him is about the cost of choosing someone.

Moorhead’s camera earns the location

Moorhead shot the film himself and the photography is genuinely lovely without tipping into travelogue. He uses a lot of drifting aerial and crane work over the cliffs and the town — this was 2014, when that kit was becoming available to people without money, and he is one of the first genre film-makers to use it as grammar rather than as showing off. The moves consistently pull up and away from Evan at moments of emotional exposure, which is a real idea: the film keeps reminding you of the scale of the landscape and the geology under the town, and the geology is the point.

The light is the other achievement. Southern Italian summer light is very hard to shoot — it blows out, it flattens faces, it makes everything look like an advert — and Moorhead works mostly at the edges of the day, in the long amber evenings and the grey-blue hour before sunrise. The film’s supernatural material happens almost entirely in that transitional light, which does the concealment work that darkness would normally do while keeping the film’s promise that this is a story about a place where the sun shines.

Jimmy LaValle’s score, drifting and post-rock in texture, is scored to the romance rather than to the horror. When the film’s most alarming sequences arrive, the music is frequently doing something tender, and the mismatch is deliberate — Benson and Moorhead are refusing to let you file Louise as a threat even while she is behaving like one.

The monster is an argument, not a metaphor

Here is the thing that separates Spring from the wave of horror films around it that were busy being About Something. Louise’s condition has rules, and the rules are explained in the language of biology rather than folklore. The film has a genuine interest in evolutionary mechanics; the exposition arrives from a character who is a working scientist and treats her own body as a research problem. Benson and Moorhead ask you to accept an enormous premise and then behave with total rigour inside it, which is exactly what they did with the storyteller-entity in Resolution and would do again with the cosmology of The Endless.

The effects are largely practical and mercifully brief. The transformations are glimpsed — a limb, a texture, something in a doorway — and the restraint is a budget decision that became an aesthetic one. You are never given a clean look, which keeps Louise a person the film happens to be hiding rather than a creature the film is exhibiting.

The real ancestor

The Lovecraft strand is obvious and the desk has walked it in cosmic dread and adapting the unadaptable Lovecraft, though Spring takes only the scale from Lovecraft and none of the misanthropy. The real ancestor is elsewhere, and it is Italian.

Cemetery Man is the film Spring is descended from: Michele Soavi’s picture is a monster romance set in Italy that treats the supernatural as the ordinary condition of the world and spends its energy on a man’s attachment to a woman who keeps being something other than a woman. Both films are funny, both are melancholy, and both are ultimately about whether it is worth loving something with a different relationship to death than yours.

The older parent is Karl Freund’s The Mummy, from 1932, which established the whole grammar: the ancient thing that wants a mortal partner, the patience, the terrible arithmetic of a creature who has watched everyone die. Benson and Moorhead simply switch the genders and give the immortal the interiority that Universal never bothered to write.

The case against

The film is long for what it is, at around 109 minutes, and it sags in the third quarter while it waits for its own deadline to arrive. There is a stretch of running-around plot involving Evan’s friend Tommy — played by Jeremy Gardner, who made The Battery — and some local trouble, which exists to generate incident and does not much interest the directors. You can feel them wanting to get back to the walking and talking.

The exposition is also a genuine problem. Louise explains herself in a long sequence that is well-performed and unmistakably a lecture, and the film never finds a way to dramatise the information rather than deliver it. A tighter picture would have trusted the audience to assemble the rules from behaviour.

And the science, for all its confidence, will not survive contact with anyone who knows any. The film’s biology is poetry wearing a lab coat. This bothers me less than it bothers some, because the rigour is emotional rather than technical — the rules matter because they force a choice, and the choice is the film.

It streams and has had disc editions. Watch it in the evening, with someone. Watch next: Resolution and The Endless for the same film-makers’ cosmology, Cemetery Man for the Italian ancestor.

Spoilers below

Louise is roughly two thousand years old, and her method is the film’s best invention. She does not age and she does not die, because every twenty years she regenerates by becoming pregnant with herself — a self-conceived embryo whose stem cells rebuild her body from scratch. The process is not a curse and it is not a gift. It is a biological function with a maintenance schedule, and she manages it with injections derived from her own embryonic material to stabilise the transitions.

When the injections fail or the cycle approaches, she reverts — cycling through her own evolutionary history, becoming, briefly and uncontrollably, older forms of animal. That is why she hunts, and why she has to. The film is careful to make her killings both horrifying and unglamorous; she is not a predator by temperament, and she cleans up afterwards like someone dealing with a chore.

The rule that makes it a love story is the one that matters. If Louise conceives a child normally — if she becomes pregnant by someone else, rather than by herself — the cycle breaks. The hormonal event overrides the mechanism. She becomes mortal, and she begins, for the first time in two millennia, to age and to be able to die. The whole film has therefore been a countdown to a deadline she has never let herself reach in two thousand years, with every previous partner abandoned before this exact moment.

Which reframes everything above the spoiler line. Louise’s wit, her deflection, her insistence on keeping Evan at arm’s length — that is not a monster hiding. It is a woman who has run this experiment enough times to know the outcome, protecting herself from a decision she has always declined. Angelo’s speeches about love as a choice made in full knowledge of the loss are the film’s thesis statement delivered an hour early.

The ending is a sunrise on a cliff, and it is genuinely suspenseful in a way that no horror set-piece in the film manages, because the tension is entirely a question of whether a person will say a true thing out loud. Evan tells her he loves her while she is mid-transformation, holding onto something that is no longer shaped like a woman, and he does it having been given every reason to run. She does not turn. She stays. The last shot rests on Louise’s face, mortal, and the horror film resolves as the rarest thing in the genre — a couple who have both looked directly at what the other actually is, and chosen it anyway. Benson and Moorhead spent their debut refusing to give an entity a satisfying ending. Here they wrote one, and earned it.