For their follow-up to Resolution, Justin Benson and Aaron S. Moorhead ditch the meta qualities of their debut feature for straight storytelling in Spring. Their film opens with Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) watching his mother succumb to cancer while taking care of her. A bar cook with only one friend in town, and now one enemy after viciously beating up a gang-banger, Evan takes the advice of people around him to leave town and start over. He packs his things, grabs his passport and calls an airline telling them to book a flight for him anywhere out of the country.

Evan winds up in Italy, wandering around until he befriends two British tourists. He follows them to a small, seaside village where he finds work as a farmhand for Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti). Spending his time off exploring the town, Evan meets Louise (a perfectly cast Nadia Hilker), a beautiful, mysterious woman. Evan convinces her to go on a date, and within a short amount of time the two appear to fall madly in love with each other. And then one night Louise wakes up and eats a stray cat outside her apartment.

Yes, Louise isn’t exactly the perfect girl. She’s keeping a dark, bizarre secret from Evan, the specifics of which don’t get revealed until later. Her body changes and transforms into strange, Lovecraftian creatures that she can only hold off by injecting herself with some sort of custom-made medication. Credit to Moorhead and Benson: the reason for Louise’s bizarre, seemingly supernatural affliction is completely original. It also ties directly into the film’s themes of rebirth, moving on and love.

The natural, comedic banter seen in Resolution makes up most of the (surprisingly superior) first half. Lou Taylor Pucci, a chameleonic character actor, gets to show off his skills with a sympathetic leading role, but Nadia Hilker feels like the real discovery in the film. Hilker, a German-born actress with a hard to place accent, possesses the seductive, well-traveled qualities making Nadia captivating presence from the second she shows up. Moorhead and Benson also find a way to work within their low-budget to pull off some inventive shots, presumably using drones or miniature helicopters to swoop through the city’s narrow alleyways and over the gorgeous ocean view.

The problem is that, even with the originality on display, some of it isn’t necessarily good. Once Moorhead and Benson lay everything out, including a fairytale-esque twist on Louise’s condition, the mystery disappears, only to get replaced with something more on-the-nose and messy. It makes the final act — a spur of the moment road trip — come across as hasty, a sort of exhausting sprint to the finish line. And the ending, a nice low-key way to close the film, still feels too abrupt considering the time spent on the build-up beforehand.

But it’s hard to dwell on the problems with Spring, even though they do exist. No one else in the horror genre is really trying the sort of material Moorhead and Benson work with here. Their influences appear vast (a few examples: An American Werewolf in London, Before Sunrise, From Beyond, and Possession), casually mixing genres without fumbling the transitions. There’s plenty to admire about Moorhead and Benson’s work in Spring, just not as much to love. It’s a slight misstep, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

This review was initially published as part of our TIFF 2014 coverage. Spring is available today March 20 in limited theaters and VOD.

Typically, horror films will go to any and all lengths to terrify and disgust us, shamelessly abandoning taste, intelligence, dignity, and finesse. They are relentless in chasing their ultimate goal: to prey on our primal fears and compel us to gleefully squirm in our seats. The horror genre is unique in that if its films contain poor acting, sloppy writing, or generally low production values and polish, these flaws are generally accepted and even embraced as long as the film provides the deliciously repulsive experience horror enthusiasts crave.

However, some filmmakers aspire to take a more cerebral approach to the genre, denouncing the notion that horror films and intellectual sophistication are mutually exclusive. Resolution, co-directed by Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson, is a genre-bending, provocative, and inventive attempt at reinvigorating and subverting the horror genre, which in recent years has been inundated with schlocky, endlessly iterative cash-grabs. Though it is an admirably ambitious and inspired work, inconsistent execution, unbalanced storytelling, and unconvincing performances hold Resolution back from being the horror film revelation it should to be.

The film opens with Michael (Peter Cilella) receiving a distressing email containing unsettling footage of his old friend Chris (Vinny Curran), heavily drugged up, showing signs of self-destruction. Following a map included in the email, Michael finds Chris squatting in a run-down, empty house in the middle of an Indian reservation. He handcuffs Chris to a pipe in the house, imposing a week-long intervention in a last-ditch effort to save his despondent friend from the black hole that is addiction.

In between helping Chris to confront and wrestle with his inner-demons, Michael explores the surrounding area and encounters a bizarre assortment of eccentrics: cult members, violent drug dealers, the threatening Native-American owners of the house he and Chris are squatting in, a mentally ill girl who watches him in his sleep, and a French researcher who shares a darkly cryptic message. Michael also slowly begins to uncover a mysterious story, told in segments in the form of VHS tapes, film reels, cave paintings, and vinyl records he finds littered throughout the reservation. He then discovers that the subjects of the eerie tale being told through these old, dusty artifacts are—impossibly—he and Chris.

The unorthodox themes and ideas in the film are presented with puzzling ambiguity, and repeated viewings are helpful in uncovering the film’s true message. The way Moorehead and Benson push and bend the horror movie format is commendably fresh and unconventional, and they create a few moments that are truly resonant (and sometimes playfully meta.) However, though the approach to the storytelling is inventive and occasionally fascinating, the story dangerously walks the line between ambiguity and inarticulation, unfortunately falling more on the side of the latter. There are key moments where weighty, innovative ideas are supposed to be represented on-screen, but these moments lose their potency due to uninteresting camerawork, unconvincing acting, and amateurish directorial choices.

For example, throughout the film, Chris is meant to be battling a fatal addiction that is ravaging his body. He vocalizes his pain incessantly, but what we are shown does not convey the agony he speaks of. At worst, he appears as if he’s fighting off a killer hangover, not life-threatening withdrawals. The camera doesn’t offer much help to Curran’s performance, as Moorehead and Benson capture him from dull, rudimentary angles too distant for us to register much of his emotion or make any real connection with his situation. What’s worse, the set design is bland and provides nothing interesting for the camera to capture.

The film’s most glaring issue lies in the ineffective portrayal of the relationship between Michael and Chris. We spend the majority of the film listening to their verbal tug-of-war, and the success of the story hinges heavily on their interactions. Unfortunately, Curran and Cilella’s performances are not strong enough to carry the weight of the thematically dense screenplay. Cilella lacks conviction and confidence, and has a tendency to mumble his words, barely making shapes with his mouth. Conversely, Curran puts on an overly-obnoxious performance that is meant to be endearing and humorous, but comes off as incredibly grating. His delivery of the over-fluffed dialog is messy, and he curses with the frequency of a 13-year-old who has just discovered the f-word. “F*ckin Mike! How the f*ck are you man? Oh god, f*ckin fantastic man f*ckin living the dream man. Isn’t this f*ckin the tits?” It’s understandable that a junkie would curse this frequently, but the abuse of the f-word unfortunately reaches the point where the dialog in between the curses virtually disappears. Cilella and Curran’s best scene comes at the film’s finale, in which they share a reflective, sentimental conversation. Cilella seems to loosen up a bit and act more naturalistically, Curran takes a break from his f-bomb rampage and speaks slowly and deliberately, and they react well off of one another. Sadly, this scene only serves to illuminate the weakness of their previous conversations.

Though Resolution does provide a few scary moments and some thought-provoking imagery (a scene involving a laptop is stellar), it frequently stumbles on its numerous missteps in execution. It aims to be a knockout, but hits more like a glancing blow. However, I cannot overstate how laudable Moorehead and Benson’s ambition is, as ambition is the characteristic that most conventional horror films lack. Though Resolution has some significant flaws, it’s important that films like it get made and that filmmakers like Moorehead and Benson continue to aim high and take chances.