In “Spring,” Why did Louise Turn Into Various Animals and Creatures?
Louise (Nadia Hilker) isn’t exactly a “normal” human being. She’s an immortal creature, kept alive by the absorption of stem cells through an evolutionary scientific process that one shouldn’t invest too much time analyzing. Spring (2014) doesn’t care whether or not the science makes sense, nor should it. This half-naturalism of Louise is the dramatic fuel of the piece; the source of its more horrific elements, and of its more romantic.
Louise describes herself as an ever-changing being. She needs to get pregnant every few decades so she can absorb the cells and become “reborn” as a new person, granting immortality. The film finds her at a time close to requiring this rebirth, where she also needs a constant intake of small stem-cell injections to keep her from mutating into various beastly forms. When Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) walks in on her as a half-octopus/half-human anomaly writhing on her apartment floor, it’s quite a moment.
The reason Louise transitions into non-human entities is because of the injections she gives herself to maintain her human figure. She notes they’re sourced from various animals. Her innerworkings are a primordial soup built from tons of different creatures over thousands of years, despite the way she looks on the outside. It toys with the notion that all life on Earth started in the same slime pool and evolved from there. Louise is the embodiment of that evolution in reverse.
On certain occasions, Louise turned into creatures more fantastical than Earth’s beasts. In the shower, she became what looked like a werewolf. In the church, she crumbled like a zombie. The film attempts to address this in conversations between Louise and Evan, when Louise says her existence goes beyond the understanding of science. She realizes that even though she has an evolutionary explanation for her existence, she can’t explain everything. A few scenes show her engaging in ritualistic behavior. Bluntly, it’s the film’s way of saying “this doesn’t really have an explanation, but that’s not what you should be focusing on.”