“Trauma horror,” or “grief horror,” has become so ubiquitous that the subgenre has infiltrated even the most quotidian commercial horror films; it seems that the actions of every masked killer, final girl, and undead creature must now be explicated by the past miseries they endured, to ever-diminishing returns. In his new film Went Up the Hill, Samuel Van Grinsven takes the subgenre back to first principles. The film wears its influences on its sleeve, and it very directly mines its sense of dread from its characters’ shared loss, yet it possesses a singularity of conceptual vision that distinguishes it from inert recent films like Talk to Me and Longlegs. Anchored by dynamic performances from Vicky Krieps and Dacre Montgomery, Went Up the Hill is a fresh, absorbing work of chamber horror that captures grief as an experience both connective and isolating, embodied and dissociative.
Jack (Montgomery) has traveled to his mother’s funeral, held in the chilly modernist house she designed and lived in, sitting isolated in a vast New Zealand mountain landscape. Jack was separated from his mother, Elizabeth, at a young age, and had never met her as an adult, but he has been invited to the funeral over the phone by her wife Jill (Krieps). At the funeral, Jill clarifies that she never called him, and was unaware that Elizabeth even had a son, but she still lets him stay in their home. That night, Jack checks on Jill — who is sleeping next to Elizabeth’s coffin — after hearing strange noises, and finds her in an altered state, claiming to be possessed by Elizabeth’s spirit. Jack blacks out, and wakes in the same room, nestled against Jill. She tells him later on that Elizabeth had drowned herself, and that she is now possessing both of their bodies while they sleep to communicate with the wife she left behind and the son she lost years ago. Both become dependent on communicating with Elizabeth with one another as proxies, yet as Jack’s visit stretches on and they both learn more about who Elizabeth really was, her spirit’s presence seems ever more malign.
As signaled by the characters’ names and the film’s title — to spell it out, Jack and Jill went up the hill — Van Grinsven’s film has the quality of a dark children’s story. Plinking, music-box-like piano is a motif in Hanan Townshend’s score, and Jack and Jill are taken advantage of in their vulnerable state of grief by a malicious entity, as if they were lost children lured by a witch. The film’s aesthetic is near-monochrome: the imposing house is all concrete and varnished wood, the clothes of the mourning characters are formal blacks or flat greys, and the wintry landscape is shot with cold clarity by director of photography Tyson Perkins. Yet the sound design is as complex as the aesthetics and text are spartan. Composer Townshend and sound designer Robert Mackenzie create a dense soundscape that flows through almost all of the film, with choral humming, tense, rhythmic breathing, and cracking ice and gurgling water immersing the viewer in the eerily amniotic world that Jack and Jill are ensconced in.
Just as the enveloping score counterbalances the spartan mise en scène, the performances of Montgomery and Krieps provide a productive contrast to how their characters are written. The dialogue is, generally, spare and declarative, and screenwriters Van Grinsven and Jory Anast provide few concrete details of who Jack and Jill are as individuals, aside from how they relate to Elizabeth. Montgomery and Krieps enliven their cryptic characters by emanating lifetimes of unsettled pain, and the despair of recent loss, through sophisticated physical and vocal acting. Montgomery is slumped and hesitant, Krieps is tense; both avoid each other’s gaze and speak in quiet monotones. Yet when their bodies are invaded by Elizabeth, they both undergo subtle, yet unmistakable, transformations.
As Elizabeth, both possess the same intensity of focus and unrelenting gaze, which, when pressed, bursts into rageful violence. Echoing Ingmar Bergman’s Persona — also a repeated visual reference, such as when a dark handprint is left on a frosted shower door — Jack and Jill’s own personalities start to merge the longer they spend isolated together. Yet it’s a credit to Montgomery and Krieps that they remain distinct — and, most impressively, that their respective portrayals of Elizabeth are perfectly aligned, and embodied so precisely and forcefully that the potentially puzzling gambit of two actors alternately playing the same character never leaves the viewer with undue confusion. In the supporting role of Elizabeth’s sister Helen, Sarah Peirse leaves as strong of an impression as the estimable Montgomery and Krieps. In a pivotal scene where Helen discloses a key piece of information about Elizabeth to Jack, she fills the hesitant gaps in the story with such deep interiority, communicated only through subtle glances and vocal intonations, that it feels her character has been revealed in full.
With its meticulously constructed visual and sonic landscape, and the uniformly powerful performances, Went Up the Hill manages both to be absorbing in its Gothic-inspired trappings and thoughtful in its staging of how grief and memories of abuse haunt those left in their wake. Van Grinsven establishes the effectively eerie tone early on, and he enriches the narrative’s emotional depth scene by scene. Stretching beyond the standard “elevated” horror setup of a provocative concept executed within the parameters of a familiar genre, Van Grinsven finds a compelling perspective on the well-worn subject of grief with depth, commitment, and constant clarity of vision.
DIRECTOR: Samuel Van Grinsven; CAST: Vicky Krieps, Dacre Montgomery, Arlo Green, Sarah Peirse; DISTRIBUTOR: Greenwich Entertainment; IN THEATERS: August 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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