(Apologies for the missing week - work has been a bear lately, but things are easing up.)
One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of the movies I’ve really liked while writing this thing is that they are often not strictly pure-bred genre films. I mean, I think it’s true that if all you consume is the same type of art you create, you’re going to get boring art. The best musicians listen to styles of music outside their genre, some of the best filmmakers watch a wide variety of films. The best horror movies aren’t just horror movies, they’re also dramas or thrillers or science fiction or crime movies or hell, sometimes even romances. Call it hybrid vigor - making something stronger by diversifying its underlying genetics.
The flip side of that is that every now and then I’ll get a film that’s putatively a horror movie, or a movie that has horror elements, but isn’t really a horror film. Monsters comes to mind, and now, so does Spring. It’s technically a monster movie, I guess, but ultimately it’s really more of a heartfelt, sorrowful meditation on loss and love.
We open on a young man in a modest, dimly lit bedroom. He’s sitting at bedside, talking to a woman lying in bed. She’s pale, quiet, gaunt. Not long for this world. She tells him a joke, he tries to tell her how amazing she and his father were…but then she’s gone. He said his goodbyes, his I-love-yous, and now there will be no more of that. His name is Evan. He’s the only child of only children, lost his father to a heart attack some months ago, and then his mother got cancer. Now they’re both gone, after he’d left college to come home and take care of his mom. They’re both gone, and he’s bereft.
Evan has had the roughest of all rough days, so he goes down to the bar where he works for some whiskey and consolation. But it’s a bar, and kind of a divey one at that, so there’s a young woman throwing some kind of “I do what I want” fit and her boyfriend decides that Evan’s looking at his woman and wants to do something about it. Evan has just watched his mother die, is still processing the idea that he’s got literally no family left, and now here’s some aggro motherfucker trying to start something. So Evan busts the gold-fronts right out the guy’s face. Of course the cops get involved, the dude is probably gonna press charges. “Run up, get done up” isn’t a viable defense in court, and the bar’s owner can’t have that kind of heat on the business, so he fires Evan even though he wasn’t on the clock. Now he doesn’t have a job, the cops are after him, and the asshole follows him home so now he knows where Evan lives.
It’s been a really bad fucking day, so Evan spends his inheritance on a trip to Italy. Just fills a backpack with some stuff, buys a ticket, and goes. He has no idea what he’s going to do there, he just knows that it’s away. He falls in with a couple of dudes from the UK that he meets at the hostel where he’s staying, they suggest a trip up the coast. There’s a lot of drinking and them sort of goading Evan into approaching a woman. I mean, what’s a trip abroad without a fling or two? Needless to say, being jet-lagged and wracked with grief is rough on his game. But then there’s this mysterious woman in a red dress. She wants Evan to come home with her. He wants to, but he owes his traveling companion a round, and wants to meet her later. She says no, now or nothing. She doesn’t “date.” But Evan doesn’t forget, and after his traveling companions bail in search of new adventure, Evan sticks around in this little coastal town, finds a room and some work at a nearby olive farm. He keeps an eye out for her.
He keeps an eye out for her, and sure enough, one day he runs across her again. He’s persistent, though not obnoxious. There’s some charm there. When he says she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, you get the sense it isn’t a line. Her name’s Louise. She’s a grad student in biology. She studies genetics, and has conned her way into a grant that allows her to travel all over Italy. Not a bad life at all. They spend a day or so together, visiting a museum, talking, drinking wine, talking, and talking, and then of course they fall into bed. Not a bad day at all…
…until, in the light of the next day, Louise sits up, desiccated and feral, skin smoking where the light hits it. She runs for her bathroom, fills a syringe, injects it, and becomes something living again.
Something human.
So yes, it’s a monster movie, but only in the sense that there’s a monster. Which is not to say that what Louise is isn’t central to the story - it is - but it’s not simple. She’s not a vampire or a werewolf or a zombie or what have you. She’s just…got a different biology from most people, and the film is about what that means for her, for Evan, for the idea of the two of them, for the idea of what life looks like. She’s been alive for a very, very long time, and would like for that to continue. All Evan knows is that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, and what Louise knows is just how painfully short that span of time is, on her timeline.
As monster movies go, this one is deeply human. There’s a sense of melancholy rootlessness to Evan - he’s still in shock and grief, and being the kind of man he is, he doesn’t really have a way to articulate that. He’s not stupid, he just lacks a lot of options for dealing with these kinds of feelings, so he’s pitched himself headlong halfway across the world, no idea of what awaits him, just sort of going on momentum alone. When something feels that awful, you just…run. As fast as you can, as far as you can. This is echoed by the cinematography - the film is suffused with the sort of dreaminess you feel when you’ve been up too long on too little sleep, and everything goes sort of soft around the edges, because that’s pretty much where his head and heart are. The editing and pacing is crisp, with some inventive transitions and juxtapositions that serve to reinforce how much in shock Evan really is. Slow, prowling aerial drone shots of the Italian coast mean you never quite lose the feeling for how far away Evan is from home, though things do start to cohere as the film goes on and Evan sees how else life could be for him, and interstitial shots of nature in all of its weird, microscopically close glory reminds us of how little we really know about how life works.
And like Louise, the film is very much its own beast. It’s definitely got its horrifying moments (the practical effects are gruesome and largely believable, helped by being employed judiciously and not being lingered on too much), but it isn’t necessarily a horror film. It’s got moments that are very funny, but it’s not a comedy. The dialogue isn’t quite naturalistic, but it’s snappy and not overly affected, and communicates who these people are well. It isn’t necessarily how people actually talk, but it feels honest. It comes from the heart. The film paints a picture of masculinity as a place where you feel things deeply, but don’t always have a way to really articulate them, so they remain repressed, or are expressed imperfectly, in dramatic gestures or bursts of violence. Evan lost everything he had, and so he ran as far away from the scene of the crime as he could, and he found someone beautiful and fascinating, and so with a glimpse of how else live could be lived, he decided to make something out of it. Never mind the medication, the transformations, the deaths, Evan saw something good. There’s a monster, but it’s not a film about triumphing over the monster. It’s a movie about just doing the best you can with the few tools you’ve been given. It’s not always smart or the right choice, but it’s all you have.
It’s a movie about a guy who meets a girl and maybe it’s all moving too fast and she lives a really complicated life, no, even more complicated than that, but the beating heart here is not one of tension or danger or imminent violence, it’s something more soulful than that. It’s the idea of making the most of the time you have, because nothing’s promised, and you never know how things are going to turn out, and wringing everything you can from here and now. There’s a lot of loss in this movie, and no happy ending is promised. These are basically decent people who make mistakes, who act selfishly, who lash out, but we all do. It’s part of being human. It’s a monster movie, but it’s not a pure-bred monster movie. It shares DNA with Before Sunrise, Altered States, and An American Werewolf In London, to name a few. It’s startling and uncomfortable and tense and funny and sad in equal measure. It has hybrid vigor.
No comments:
Post a Comment