Samuel Van Grinsven’s supernatural drama delivers haunting imagery and gloom, but little emotional pull
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
I don’t know quite what to make of New Zealand filmmaker Samuel Van Grimsven’s second effort, “Went Up the Hill.” Besides invoking the Kate Bush title “Running Up That Hill,” the film features “Stranger Things” (hello, Kate) cast member Dacre Montgomery and Luxembourgish actor Vicky Krieps as Jack and Jill (Get it? Hill?), respectively, in a supernatural tale involving possession.
Jack has returned to New Zealand for the funeral of his birth mother, Elizabeth, who abandoned him as a child. Jill is Elizabeth’s widow. The two meet at an architecturally impressive, if not exactly welcoming, cliffside home beside snowy mountains. Everyone at the wake is dressed in color-coordinating dark hues. The house is a warren of smallish spaces clad in cement, wood paneling and glass. On the day after they meet, Jill begins to behave like Elizabeth in front of Jack. His response is, “Who are you? What is this?” These are questions I was still asking at the end of the film. With its expensive sweaters, ornate scarves and monochrome color scheme, “Went Up the Hill” suggests a mix of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” and an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. Jack, who is gay and has fraught phone conversations with his lover Ben (Arlo Green). Elizabeth, who was an acclaimed artist, designed the house and left behind drawings, sketches and a scale model of the house.
Jill is also an artist whose medium is woven thread. Like Homer’s Penelope, she does not complete her latest effort. Krieps has such striking features and goddess-like proportions that she does not need a character to keep us and the camera interested. Elizabeth, we learn, drowned herself in the frozen lake down the hill. Like Virginia Woolf, she stuffed rocks in her pockets. Also in the mix is Elizabeth’s older sister Helen (New Zealand actor Sarah Peirse, another great face). Jack was taken away from a mentally unstable Elizabeth by Helen and handed over to New Zealand child services.
Watching “Went Up the Hill,” I wondered at times if this was a film or a ballet; the actors’ movements are as choreographed as the colors of their clothes, which are mostly pajamas. A lot of sleeping and waking up goes on in “Went Up the Hill, and you never know who is going to be possessed by the spirit of Elizabeth, Jill or Jack, or if anything that happens is real or a dream.
Eventually, I wearied of wandering through this Oedipal psych-horror maze. The day of Elizabeth’s cremation approaches. Boy-man Jack whines away. Helen, who stays at a nearby lodge, wants to know what is going on between Jill and Jack (at least she cares). “How is this real?” someone asks. It isn’t.
For one thing, not counting the spirit of Elizabeth, Jill and Jack are entirely alone in the house. Who makes the food? Who cleans? Jill sleeps on a mattress beside the coffin of Elizabeth. Sleepless, Jack joins her early in the story. These are two gay people, one of them, the woman, possessed by the gay mother of the other, the man. Hmm, Dr. Freud, what might happen in a case like this?
That ambient music washing over the action is courtesy of Terrence Malick regular Hanan Townshend (“Knight of Cups”). Jill’s family is not in her life, which explains why she gets so few phone calls. After a confrontation with Jill (or Elizabeth’s ghost), Jack goes outside barefoot and slides down a real and metaphorical hill, scraping his face and head (I am tempted to say he “broke his crown”). He heals rather miraculously. Or we might just have slipped into another dream. Jack and Jill’s heads fill the screen like moons. Why does Krieps appear to have half-shaved eyebrows?
In a weightily meaningful sequence, Jill (Or is it Elizabeth?) bathes the injured Jack. Is he reliving the childhood that was stolen from him? If only Van Grinsven, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jory Anast of the misconceived “Better Man,” had introduced us to these characters. I might have cared. Cinematographer Tyson Perkins shoots with Jane Campion-like frequency the misty mountains in the near distance. They stand like ancient witnesses to human suffering. By the end of this Freudian Versace commercial, Jack and Jill go down a hill and wander onto the ice.
‘Went Up the Hill
Rating: Sexually suggestive scene, nudity, mature themes.
Cast: Hege, Vicky Krieps, Dacre Montgomery
Director: Samuel Van Grinsven
Writers: Jory Anast, Van Grinsven
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common.
Grade: C
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