Went Up the Hill is one of those stiff, formally austere films that critics feel obliged to describe as “meditative” or “cerebral”. It’s a deeply pensive ghost story with a difference, following Jack (Dacre Montgomery), a man who learns about his mother, Elizabeth – who abandoned him as a child – via unconventional means. She speaks to him through her widowed wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps), after her death by suicide. And vice versa, she can also enter Jack and speak to Jill, creating a strange dynamic with three characters in two bodies.
In a more conventional horror production, these “from the grave” conversations might be staged with wild eyes, demonic voices, spinning heads and splattering fluids. But this is a steely, deadly serious work, directed by Samuel Van Grinsven with a hand so steady it could thread a needle in a hurricane. The film is pristinely controlled, though that pristineness often feels empty – like a skyscraper lobby or a vacant ballroom.
Jack and Jill meet early at Elizabeth’s funeral, where Jack is asked how he knew her. He didn’t, he replies: Jill invited him, though she has no recollection of doing so. This mystery might ordinarily be a MacGuffin: an event that spurs the plot into action. Except plot is something Van Grinsven (co-writing with Jory Anast) conditions us to forgo. The film, instead, centres on the internal and interpersonal – bereavement, loss and abandonment.
The circumstances grow more bizarre through Jack and Jill’s connection, which is not only emotional but physical, even sensual: for Jack, something approaching an oedipal complex with an out-of-body twist. We encounter the characters during grief-stricken, psychologically fragile times, making it hard to discern how they might normally behave – not to mention their (not exactly quotidian) dealings with the spirit world.
Still, it’s peculiar how much time we spend with these people, and how little I felt I knew them by the end. It’s often assumed that emotionally intense moments reveal who a person really is. Here, Jack and Jill’s anguish obscures rather than illuminates their inner selves; anguish was also core to Van Grinsven’s nervy, sensually shot previous film, Sequin in a Blue Room – a coming-of-age drama about a young gay man obsessed with finding a stranger he meets at a sex party.
The tension between Jack and Jill begins languidly, but deepens as Krieps (a well-known actor in Europe, whose breakthrough international role was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread) and Montgomery expand their impressive, if stony performances. Krieps has an enigmatic, melancholic gaze that simultaneously draws you in and pushes you away. Her performance is carefully textured, as is Montgomery’s, who portrays a man hemmed in by various barriers and blockages. Calling the drama a story about “ghosts of the past” may sound trite but there’s certainly an element of that.
It’s unquestionably a slow-burn, though I’m wary of deploying any words associated with warmth – because Went Up the Hill is cold as hell. Rarely have I seen a film with such hot emotions that’s so tonally frigid. The chill is locational, set in New Zealand’s South Island, much of it unfolding inside a modern, brutalist house, its walls nearly the same colour as a nearby ice-covered lake. Cinematographer Tyson Perkins (who shot Thou Shalt Not Steal and Mystery Road: Origin) composes crisp, sharp images glazed in a bluish, icicle-like hue.
Things eventually escalate, the pressure valve of pent-up emotions building and releasing. But it’s a long and demanding ride to get there, full of solemn looks and thousand-yard stares. In this film the living people feel ghostly, even when they’re not inhabited by an apparition – perhaps Van Grinsven’s most chilling achievement.
Went Up the Hill is out in Australian and US cinemas now, with a UK streaming release yet to be announced
