A profound and unshakable sense of unease pervades the entirety of Spring, from the opening scene all the way to the unexpected finish. Ostensibly, the film starts out somewhat like Before Sunrise, if that Richard Linklater film took place entirely in the headspace of the Ethan Hawke character while he traveled Europe by train. Here, we stick with Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) as he chooses to leave behind his problems in the United States with a hopefully soul-cleansing trip to Italy, and finds himself inextricably attracted to an alluring young woman whose own backstory approaches the supernatural.
The anxiety, however, hovers over the film well before Evan and Louise (Nadia Hilker) meet by chance as he wanders aimlessly through an Italian village. Spring opens with Evan sitting at the deathbed of his cancer-stricken mother; though he has clearly accepted the inevitable, her passing is nevertheless painful, compounded by the fact that he’s now without any close relatives, just a couple of buddies at the local watering hole where he works. After his temper gets the best of him, he not only loses his job but winds up being threatened by the same thug he beat up in a fit of fury. Thus, on the suggestion of a girl he tries to hook up with by using his mother’s death as the ultimate sympathy card, he takes his passport and impulsively heads to Italy. Though he spends some time with a rowdy Welsh/Cockney duo he meets in a hostel, Evan is immediately drawn to the enigmatic Louise, to the point where he sticks around the village and begins working at a local farm.
But what Evan doesn’t know about Louise is…well, that would be spoiling the surprises of the second half of Spring. Writer and co-director Justin Benson (his co-director, Aaron Moorhead, also functions as cinematographer, among other duties) has essentially crafted a romance with hints of terror around the corner. If anything, Benson and Moorehead toss in one too many such hints: The first third of the film is so forcefully from Evan’s perspective that when he first sees Louise in the town square, the camera pans down from the sky to her sitting at a bench as if to evoke his own look down, while the rest of the film sometimes shifts into an omniscient point-of-view, allowing us to see Louise as she handles various…changes in her life. Also, there are a few too many establishing shots from scene to scene that focus on nearby flora and fauna; by the third or fourth instance of such a shot, it’s easy to guess that these are not accidental and may have something to do with the terrifying imagery being thrown at us at intervals.
Those minor issues, though, don’t damage the effectiveness of the whole. Pucci is a convincingly besotted “ugly American” even when Evan tails Louise like a puppy, and Hilker manages to walk a careful line between conveying both tantalizing disinterest and a helpless curiosity for exploring a deeper relationship with this stranger. Perhaps most importantly, Benson and Moorhead are able to wring as much suspense from their judicious application of gory special effects as from the relatively more mundane images captured via drones. What happens to Evan and Louise throughout their whirlwind romance is certainly surprising, but the drone photography is almost as uncomfortable—and just as surprising, as it’s never a given when one establishing shot will be captured handheld or through drones. The sudden shift from even the mildest of shaky-cam to smooth, fluid shots of the Italian village is a uniquely disturbing way of introducing discord in the story; Italy has rarely looked as alternately beautiful and terrifying as it does here. All of this helps Spring add up to a solidly disquieting meditation on the nature of love and how it can inspire fervent determination in even the laziest slacker.
