Went Up the Hill Is an Emotionally Powerful but Ponderous Queer Ghost Story
It’s a fine line that exists between atmosphere and cinematic torpor. Elements such as darkness, stillness, silence and coldness can evoke the desired sense of suffocation that characters are experiencing during a period of extreme grief, confusion and loss of identity … but at some point, a concession must also be made toward keeping the audience engaged in the story that is playing out. Evoking misery is one thing; making the viewer slog through it in order to progress a simple story is another. In this way, the push-pull between effective emotional evocation and a grinding loss of narrative momentum forms the crux of the difficult-to-assess Went Up the Hill, the sophomore feature from New Zealand director Samuel Van Grinsven. A queer ghost story with devastating emotional power and transgressive themes of domination, selfishness and abandonment, it is all too often hamstrung by plodding stylistic choices and a thin script that stretches many of its interactions until they’re so thin, threadbare and ethereal that they end up just as spectral.
That Went Up the Hill revolves almost entirely (visibly, at least) around two characters named “Jack” and “Jill” is something of an oddly cute-seeming choice, given the dreary, entirely serious and morose screenplay from Grinsven and co-writer Jory Anast. We’ll give you two guesses as to whether Jack ultimately falls down and breaks his crown, in a manner of speaking, but suffice to say, the film centers itself around two characters sharing the same loss in vastly different ways, and reckoning with the psychic scars that abuse has left behind, mingled with toxic attraction and emotional dependency.
Jack (Dacre Montgomery) is a young gay man out of place, arriving at the remote funeral of Elizabeth, the mother he barely ever knew. Given up for adoption as a young child, for reasons he has never understood, Jack is surprised to be invited to the funeral by Elizabeth’s widow Jill (Vicky Krieps), only to be confronted with an odd reality upon arriving: Jill has no memory of inviting him, nor was Jill ever actually aware of Jack’s existence until now. It’s our first hint at the mechanic that Went Up the Hill will entirely revolve around, which is spiritual possession.
In a more traditional psychological horror yarn, this thought of possession would be portrayed with a great deal of uncertainty and ambivalence on the part of the filmmaker. Consider, for instance, Jack Clayton’s essential 1961 gothic horror classic The Innocents, where the question from start to finish is how much of what Deborah Kerr’s Miss Giddens is experiencing is real, or in her mind. Is the young Miles truly being possessed by the spirit of the home’s lecherous former groundskeeper, or is Miss Giddens irreparably damaging the boy in her attempt to ferret out spiritual corruption where it doesn’t exist, driven by her own deteriorating mental state?
Went Up the Hill does not deal in that kind of uncertainty: We are shown in no uncertain terms that not only is the spirit of Elizabeth still present in the cold, unforgiving, cement-slabbed, mausoleum-like modern home she designed as an award-winning architect, but that this spirit has the ability to enter into both Jack and Jill’s bodies on a nightly basis, effectively allowing each of them to commune with her as an otherworldly triptych. We’re not meant to question whether any of it is in fact happening; Went Up the Hill is instead about teasing out threads of the complex web of desires and emotions present between these three.
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