The contemporary antipodean Gothic is an underexplored and underutilised genre. Australian and New Zealand filmmakers make excellent horror films, wonderful outback noirs, blistering inner city dramas, and brilliant comedies – but rarely do they use the uncanny phantasmagoria of certain parts of the natural vistas of both countries as a backdrop for the dark fantastic. Australian director Samuel Van Grinsven and co-screenwriter Jory Anast’s Went Up the Hill is proof of how ripe the cinematic and actual landscape is for hauntings.
Jack (Dacre Montgomery) is a young gay visual artist who has arrived in a near permanent mist shrouded New Zealand to attend the funeral of his estranged mother, a feted architect. Elizabeth’s impeccably designed but austere house is where her coffin rests. Jack moves quietly into the funeral where someone says of Elizabeth that she is now at rest surrounded by her two loves: the fine art of her design work and her wife Jill (Vicky Krieps). Jack keeps his head down until he is accosted by a woman (Sarah Peirse) who asks him how he knew Elizabeth. She is intent on making a scene, pushing at him to explain why he is there. Eventually he says, “She was my mother, and I was invited by Jill.” The woman is his maternal aunt Helen, and she does not want him around. Jill is confused as she doesn’t recall inviting Jack, but she understands that it was what Elizabeth would have wanted, and going against Helen decides to let him stay for the cremation.
Jill is fatigued and fragile, lost in grief. Elizabeth was her world, the two of them living in almost ascetic isolation in the mountains outside of Christchurch. The only warmth and softness in the house comes from Jill’s textile art – she is an accomplished weaver. Inviting Jack into Elizabeth’s home is something Jill is bound to do as it is revealed that Elizabeth’s unquiet spirit is haunting her on more than a metaphorical level. She is possessing her body when she sleeps. Jack is there at Elizabeth’s invitation and his need to understand why his mother abandoned him as a child is a tether to both Jill and the strange monument to Elizabeth which is the space she designed.
Jill reveals to Jack that Elizabeth was very sick when she died – something that was whispered by the guests at the funeral – but she died suddenly. Elizabeth was mentally ill, and her death was suicide by drowning. Rocks in her pocket as she descended into a deep lake. Elizabeth chose to die but she has not chosen to leave. In the howling wind her presence groans and she sits in muteness inside either Jill or Jack’s body until they ask a question. She is using her wife and son as human Ouija boards to speak of her mysteries to them. Worse, she begins to use them as puppets to enact her desires.
Malevolence is not always overt. When Jill is Elizabeth, she tells Jack she cannot tell a lie, but she can also speak in half-truths. In her study are Jack’s ghostly portraits of bodies in embrace. Jack’s work is spectral, the embraces can be read as erasures of personality. He is touched that the woman who made no effort to reunite with him after he was taken from her as a child (by Helen) has kept some memento of him. He reads her collection of his art as him having a place in her heart.
Having a place in Elizabeth’s heart in life as in death means erasure and harm. Jill’s body is marked by scratches and bruises. When Jack accepts that Elizabeth is truly speaking through himself and Jill, he begins to notice he has limited control – waking up next to Jill embracing her or vice versa. When ‘Elizabeth’ is the speaker neither Jack nor Jill are important – they are means to her own ends.
The layers of perversity and diseased perspective are handled with ease by Samuel Van Grinsven’s sophisticated and subtle direction. First time feature cinematographer Tyson Perkins uses his camera to switch and force perspective. A room appears large then impossibly small. The mountains around the property are vast and majestic but unreachable. Elizabeth’s house is a prison where only shades of grey, black, blue, brown, and beige register until there is the shocking red of the house alarm and blood. The house is a series of glass windows from floor to ceiling which reinforces both the trap Jill and Jack are in and their picturesque yet chilling isolation.
Vicky Krieps handles the switch between registers as Jill and Elizabeth with practiced professionalism. Krieps’ face and voice illustrate suffering and suffocation both as victim (Jill) and perpetrator (Elizabeth). Jill is a modern-day Gothic heroine wrapped in woollen shawls facing the elements of a freezing wind, a frozen lake, and a mercurial and dangerous obsession that she allowed to control her for too long.
Dacre Montgomery, in his first role playing an Australian, is the walking psychologically wounded. His fractured memories of a mother he believes loved him keep him tied to ‘Elizabeth’ as his child self and seeking comfort from Jill as his adult self. His chiselled physicality: important in being able to bodily intimidate or seduce Jill (as Elizabeth) is balanced by his searching and wounded eyes.
Went Up the Hill might take its name from the nursery rhyme ‘Jack and Jill’, but it is a film for adults. A nightmare of co-dependence where two people must recognise they are holding trauma as grief and those things are not the same.
Samuel Van Grinsven’s sophomore feature is reminiscent of the art of Ingmar Bergman, a cold dance with death and the merging and dissolving barriers between individuality. Went Up the Hill is a note-perfect Gothic: stunning, uneasy, and harrowing. An elegant and challenging ghost story rising from the frozen New Zealand firmament with a unique timbre in Australasian filmmaking. Went Up the Hill is an outstandingly mature and striking psychological drama and an intelligent and resonant ghost story.
Director: Samuel Van Grinsven
Cast: Dacre Montgomery, Vicky Krieps, Sarah Peirse
Writers: Jory Anast, Samuel Van Grinsven
Producers: Kristina Ceyton, Samantha Jennings, Vicky Pope
Music: Hanan Townshend
Cinematography: Tyson Perkins
Editor: Dany Cooper