‘Went Up the Hill’ Review: A Remarkable, Tragic Ghost Story
Grief is never the same. It’s a chimera, wearing many faces and afflicting everyone with the same core, with different outcomes. We grieve for things and places, time lost, and opportunities missed. And we grieve for love, of course. I’m reminded of a Shirley Jackson quote from The Haunting of Hill House, “I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.” We are all small creatures, and Jack (Dacre Montgomery, Stranger Things) is the smallest of us all in Sam Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill, a ghost story that swallowed me whole.
Jack’s absent mother has died by suicide. He attends the funeral, unwanted by his aunt, Helen (Sarah Peirse), though welcomed by his mother’s wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps, beyond excellent). Remote New Zealand constrains them, with sparse sets and sparser dialogue. Everyone speaks in that trauma-horror whisper, only enunciating when the drama has reached its simmer. And simmer it does when Jack’s mother, Elizabeth, possesses both Jack and Jill at revolving intervals.
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There’s possessed ghost sex between grieving son and grieving widow, played not for shock but gut-wrenching, disturbing, yet tender intimacy. Went Up the Hill is cinematic therapy, the kind of closure we’d all ostensibly want with our deceased loved ones. An opportunity to talk to them, probe them, antagonize and rile them. Elizabeth riles back, and Went Up the Hill grows darker, slithering into the realm of abuse and the tethers that connect us to the people who hurt us most.
It’s dour, anti-feel-good stuff, a ghost story in the vein of Stacey Gregg’s Here Before, a living dead picture not quite unlike 28 Years Later. The genre elements are props, set decorations for a deeply human story about deeply complicated feelings. The ghost has always been a metaphor, though rarely as transparently and as nuanced as it is here. Went Up the Hill is heavy, never conceding to levity. The grief and ghosts sting over its lengthy run.
Memories intrude, Jack and Jill’s (yes, the nursery rhyme) relationship deepens, and both come to understand one another via the person who hurt them both most. Sam Van Grinsven aims to heal, not harm, even if spouts of violence nudge Went Up the Hill closer to horror in its final act. This is about coming to terms with the past with hope for the future. Jack calls his partner to cryptically share that he’s run off for something he needed to do alone. Jill seems almost catatonic whenever she’s not being possessed by her deceased wife. Elizabeth was their life, and, yes, like a ghost, she will haunt them long after she’s gone.
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Went Up the Hill interrogates those nuances, though not always to great effect. The grim wavelength kept me engaged, though it just as easily threatened to turn me off as it revisited the same core theme again, again, and again. This is firmly the era of trauma horror, of not just ghosts, but genre as Capital M Metaphor, and while that’s always been the genre historically, it’s not often been so blatant. Yet, Went Up the Hill largely earns its blatantness. Krieps, as noted, is superb, and Montgomery is a worthy foil. Cold cinematography (Tyson Perkins) augments the mood, and Hanan Townshend’s score is deliberately unobtrusive.
Went Up the Hill is a personal story with personal scares. It’ll haunt you, too. Not in the way something like The Changeling or The Conjuring might, but in another, altogether different and very human way. Everyone in our lives is a ghost in waiting. One day, long after death, they might be back, and sometimes that is neither welcome nor scary, just confusing and painful.
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Went Up the Hill
Summary
Went Up the Hill is dour, anti-feel-good stuff in the most complimentary terms imaginable.
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