TORONTO—Went Up the Hill concerns characters named Jack and Jill, and no, it never recovers from that groan-worthy fact.
Pairing Vicky Krieps and Stranger Things alum Dacre Montgomery in a drama about pain, regret, neglect, brutality, and letting go, Samuel Van Grinsven’s sophomore feature—premiering Sept. 5 at the Toronto International Film Festival—is part ghost story, part abuse nightmare, and part psychosexual haunted thriller. Though it boasts committed performances from its leads, its affectations are so copious that they drown out its few unnervingly moving moments. And despite a premise that begets one of the strangest lovemaking scenes in recent memory—a quasi-incestuous gender-bending head-spinner—the film is too frequently the epitome of pretentiousness.
At the foothills of towering New Zealand mountains, Jack (Montgomery) arrives at a remote modernist house—all wood-paneled walls, concrete floors, and minimalist décor—for the funeral of his mother, Elizabeth. who gave him up when he was very young. Jack doesn’t know anyone here, but the initial glance he shares with Helen (Sarah Peirse), his aunt, indicates that she remembers him well, and isn’t altogether thrilled with his reappearance. As an explanation for his attendance, Jack informs Helen that he was invited by Jill (Krieps), his mother’s wife. Yet in the first of many bizarre twists, Jill has no recollection of phoning Jack, and moreover, didn’t even know he existed until he showed up that day.
Regardless of this inexplicable situation, Jill asks Jack to stay in her and Elizabeth’s home, which is as sparse and chilly as the misty surrounding landscape.
Ghostly imagery is everywhere in Went Up a Hill, from shots that are partially or completely out of focus, to images of silhouettes behind hazy glass or through a lake’s frozen surface, and the otherworldly mood is exacerbated by a soundtrack filled with ominous musical cues, unholy moaning, and rhythmic breathing. This milieu is the ideal spot for communing with the dead, and that’s precisely what Jack and Jill wind up doing, with the latter swiftly informing the former that, while Elizabeth is deceased, she’s still present in spectral form—and, as it turns out, can possess her body when she drifts off to sleep.
Neither Jack nor Jill has gotten over the passing of Elizabeth, whom it’s soon revealed hated her sister Helen—and consequently pushed her away, much to Helen’s chagrin. More crucially, she committed suicide by walking into the nearby icy lake with rocks stuffed inside her pockets.
The inability to move on means that both Jack and Jill are beholden to Elizabeth’s spirit, and they’re preyed upon throughout Went Up the Hill. This both frightens and enthralls them, and in terms of out-there perversity, it peaks early on, with Elizabeth inhabiting her son Jack in order to use his gay male body to make love to her lesbian spouse Jill. Set against a black backdrop and filmed in slow-motion, this bonkers coupling visually recalls Caravaggio, whereas a later panorama of Jack running across a nocturnal field of tall grass has a decidedly impressionistic quality. In both cases, Van Grinsven’s painterliness is entrancing, and all the more so for seeming at once tactile and unreal.
Unfortunately, Went Up the Hill doesn’t boast additional wacko flourishes. Rather, it’s content to be, narratively and aesthetically, a dour affair in which Krieps and Montgomery stare at each other (and off into the distance) with agony and terror in their eyes, as well as speak in hushed tones about the nature of their circumstances. Jack additionally makes a handful of phone calls to his never-seen boyfriend Ben (Arlo Green), who’s not too happy about once again being abandoned by Jack. Loss and loneliness are omnipresent, as is bifurcation, with Van Grinsven routinely separating his protagonists (and other objects) in his scrupulously symmetrical frame, be it Elizabeth’s casket (which boasts a diagonal line on its lid) or separate mirrors (one with a white background, the other black) in which Jack and Jill are spied.
Went Up the Hill is formally mannered to death, its style so self-conscious that it smothers the life out of the proceedings. Krieps and Montgomery are as grief-stricken, tormented, and bewildered as is demanded by Van Grinsven and Jory Anast’s script. Yet the action is so look-at-me forlorn that it renders their intensity borderline silly; in the context of ceaseless directorial posturing, the sight of Jill throwing a mini-tantrum in her foyer before storming off, or suddenly bursting into hysterical wailing on the floor, is less moving than unintentionally funny.
Krieps is such a fine actress that it’s a shame to see her trying so hard with this subpar material. Not helping matters, she and Montgomery don’t have much chemistry, in any regard, which undercuts their condition as intertwined kindred souls plagued by an unwillingness to leave the past (and its traumas and scars) behind.
Fuzzy flashbacks to Jack’s separation from Elizabeth (or are they?) enhance Went Up the Hill’s air of mystery. The film temporarily snaps out of its maudlin torpor once Jack and Jill realize not only that Elizabeth wants Jill to do whatever she can to keep Jack around, but that if they don’t comply with her wishes to remain in the house and committed to her, she’ll engage in the sort of viciousness that originally cost her custody of her son.
Domestic violence is—to use a metaphor borrowed from the film itself, since Jill likes to weave on her loom—one of this tale’s many threads, and Elizabeth’s cruelty provides a couple of suspenseful jolts. Regrettably, those wind up being merely halfhearted gestures, with Van Grinsven eventually returning to the wraithlike preciousness that is his preferred mode of operation.
As an amorous ghost story about heartache and lonesomeness, Went Up the Hill faintly recalls Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, the difference being that Van Grinsven’s supernatural solemnity is unduly exaggerated and, therefore, unconvincing. That, during the climax, Jack literally falls down would be more egregious if not for the film’s preceding ponderousness. It is, however, the final nail in the coffin for this misguided saga of nasty ghosts and the people who don’t know how to let them rest.
