Spring (2015)

First, the boring bit.

Lou Taylor Pucci stars as a young man who has been caring for his mother through a long, terminal illness. She dies, and the day after her funeral Evan gets into a fight in the pub he works at, which costs him his job. Fearing assault charges and retribution from the bloke he beat up, Evan decides on the spur of the moment to go to Europe (how is he paying for that?). 

    He meets an Italian woman named Louise (Nadia Hilker), and the two of them begin a passionate affair, with Evan taking a job at a nearby farm in order to earn a living (that’s how!), and seemingly making plans to stay in Italy for the foreseeable future. Long story short, Louise turns out to be some sort of conditionally immortal reptilian creature - you were wondering what this had to do with horror for a minute there, right? 

    Anyway, here’s how Louise’s immortality works: every twenty years she has to get pregnant, so that her body can recycle the foetus for stem cells to regenerate.  The down side is, if she ever falls in love with someone, the flood of oxytocin in her body will prevent her body from consuming the foetus, and she’ll permanently lose her immortality. It all sounds a bit fairy tale, I know, but it works on screen thanks to Justin Benson’s abilities as a screenwriter. I’ll leave the end unspoilt, as I don’t need to tell you what happens to discuss the film.

I hate plot synopses - I always feel like I’m just re-typing a Wikipedia article. 

Spring, written by Justin Benson and directed by him and Aaron Scott Moorhead, is a deeply moving meditation on grief, mortality, and how we cope with loss. With a bit of editing, the script could have been a conventional romantic drama, and I think it’s the sign of a truly brilliant writer when a work of art could work equally well in a completely different genre. The reason why Spring works so well is that, at its heart, it’s a story about a man who has lived in grief for a long time, and how he comes to terms with that grief; and about a young woman, who has lived a life of unimaginable loneliness out of the fear of death, and who finally finds something worth facing that fear for. It’s not a horror film (despite being categorised as one on Netflix), but it is beautiful, heartfelt, and human to the core.