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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

>>> Spring

SPRING Rating: NNNN

Watch online: iTunes


Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring is a love story, a coming-of-age tale and a horror movie. It’s an elegant piece of mashup cinema: Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise with a monster.

In a house in California, Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci, of Thumbsucker and the Evil Dead remake) loses his mother to cancer. Shattered and looking to escape, he winds up in the Apulia region of Italy, where he meets a striking young woman named Louise (German actor Nadia Hilker, in her first major English-speaking role).

She’s interested he’s wary. Both have their reasons. But eventually they get together and spend a few lovely days getting to know each other. And early one morning, Louise sneaks away and eats a cat.

The charm of Spring is in how fully it embraces the weirdness of that premise. Benson’s script is as interested in the nature of Louise’s condition as it is in how Evan will react when he finds out what’s going on. And that gives Benson and Moorhead – whose previous feature, Resolution, took similar pleasures in subverting horror tropes even as it celebrated the genre – the space to make a very human monster movie.

Don’t read anything else. Just see it. Spring is special. 110 minutes. Some subtitles.

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