WENT UP THE HILL

TWO STARS When Elizabeth dies, both her wife and son are visited by her ghost. She's not in a good mood.

DRAMA NZ English #WENTUPTHEHILL Starring Vicky Krieps, Dacre Montgomery

WENT UP THE HILL opens when Jack meets Jill (yeah) at a funeral for a woman who isn’t ready to leave. Samuel Van Grinsven’s feature, starring Vicky Krieps (CORSAGE) and Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things), wants to be a ghost story, a trauma drama, and a psychosexual provocation. What it mostly is, however, is self-absorbed.

Jack arrives at a chic modernist home in the New Zealand wilderness for his mother Elizabeth’s funeral. She gave him up as a child, so he’s a stranger here. His aunt Helen (Sarah Peirse) recognises him, but without warmth. Jack claims he was invited by Jill (Krieps), Elizabeth’s wife, but she never called him - in fact, she didn’t know he existed. Odd, yet he stays and so begins the world’s frostiest house share.

From there it’s misty landscapes, blurry frames, silhouettes behind frosted glass, and enough ominous breathing to fill the Death Star. Jill reveals that Elizabeth still “visits” her - inhabiting her body while she sleeps. Turns out neither Jack nor Jill can let her go, and soon he is also visited by his mother. But she's not in a good mood, and things go (ahem) downhill, rapidly.

The centrepiece - and possibly the reason the film exists — is a slow-motion, black-background scene in which Elizabeth possesses Jack’s gay (“it runs in the family” quips Jill) body to make love to her wife using her son. It shouldn't be, but is perversely beautiful, the kind of thing Caravaggio might have conjured up. A later shot of Jack running through a moonlit field has similar impact. Sadly, the rest is two hours of staring into space, speaking in hushed tones about Elizabeth, and holding long, long poses in symmetrical frames.

Krieps and Montgomery try, but for a two-hander relying on shared chemistry, there’s little on display. That’s largely down to a script which gives them grief to perform but no real emotional depth to work with. Jack occasionally phones his boyfriend Ben to remind us someone in the outside world cares, but it’s a subplot as neglected as Ben himself. History’s repeating, geddit?

Hints of domestic violence promise tension, and Elizabeth’s threats if they leave the house offer an occasional jolt, but these threads are quickly lost in the fog of mood and mannerism. Van Grinsven is deeply in love with his compositions - divided mirrors, split coffins, separated characters — and they are quite stunning. But there's little room left to get invested in the story. Even Jack’s literal fall in the climax - a moment that should sting - feels like a final clumsy metaphor for a film stumbling under its own self-absorption.

There’s talent here: the imagery is striking, the premise intriguing. Krips and Montgomery have done some terrific work. But WENT UP THE HILL mistakes stillness for suspense and solemnity for depth. It’s a ghost story trapped in its own haunted house of style, where the atmosphere is thick, the pacing glacial, and the emotional connection somewhere over the next ridge - but we never get there.

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