Film
Samuel Van Grinsven’s gothic horror Went Up the Hill possesses a stern, terrifying beauty but fails in its narrative. By Christos Tsiolkas.
Went Up the Hill is too timid for a ghost story
There’s an austere grandeur to the phenomenal beauty of New Zealand’s South Island, particularly in winter, where the jutting slopes and wind-scraped valleys recall the panoramas of northern Europe. The pale-faced descendants of the Scots, the English and the Dutch don’t seem as out of place as they do in the verdant terrain of the North Island. And unlike Australia, New Zealand never had the abomination of convict transportation as part of its colonial history. Travelling the South Island, particularly in winter, a human knows their place. It can make you believe in predestination.
In his new film, Went Up the Hill, which featured at the Melbourne International Film Festival, director Samuel Van Grinsven uses the severity of these landscapes to emphasise the gothic elements of the ghost story he is telling. The first image we see is a black-clad figure ascending an icy tor, the wind howling on the soundtrack. Jack, played by Dacre Montgomery, is attending the wake of his architect mother, Elizabeth.
The memorial is taking place in the sombre brutalist house Elizabeth designed, its stark concrete walls set atop an intimidating cliff-face. As soon as Jack enters the house, his presence seems a threat to the elegant mourners. One of them, Helen (Sarah Peirse), Elizabeth’s sister, demands to know why he is here. Jack claims he has been invited by his mother’s widow, Jill (Vicky Krieps). Though Jill denies having called Jack, Krieps plays her with a tentativeness and barely submerged apprehension that suggests fear is entwined with her grief. She insists that Jack stay at the house. On that first night he discovers his mother’s ghost is haunting the house, Elizabeth’s spirit alternating between possessing first Jill, then Jack.
The film is most successful as a gothic horror visually and sonically. From those first opening scenes, Van Grinsven is deliberately referencing the aesthetics of the great Scandinavian image-makers. In long shot, the mourners look as if they are 17th century Puritans framed by Carl Dreyer, and, as Elizabeth’s possessions take on an increasingly terrifying power, the anguished close-ups are suggestive of Ingmar Bergman. The excellent cinematography by Tyson Perkins is frosty, almost monochromatic in its focus on blacks and blues, greys and whites.
Impressive as well is the quietly sinister score by Hanan Townshend, as is the effective sound design, which accentuates the isolation of the haunted house in the sublimely terrifying landscape. Formally, Went Up the Hill refuses the temptation to be excessive in its borrowings from gothic tropes. The menace we experience is stronger for that restraint.
I wish, however, that Van Grinsven and his co-writer, Jory Anast, had employed a similar self-discipline when it came to the screenplay. There’s too much going on with the story, with borrowings from the novels of both Charlotte and Emily Brontë, as well as from Shirley Jackson. Elizabeth’s suicide, as she walks into a frozen lake with her coat stuffed with rocks, has echoes of Virginia Woolf’s suicide. The film seems to be deliberately playing with echoes of Wuthering Heights, with Jack, Jill and Elizabeth’s ghost alternating being Catherine and Heathcliff.
The script doesn’t have the dramatic tenacity of Emily Brontë’s story. As well as these classical gothic resonances, Van Grinsven is also seeking to explore questions of mental illness and spousal and child abuse. Reframing that exploration within a queer lens is tantalising. Yet as the ghost’s malevolence increases and both Jill’s and Jack’s lives are placed in peril, the scenes become frantic, more and more improbable. We never get an understanding of Elizabeth, of what led to Jill falling in love with her in the first place or of how she managed to settle the conflict between violence and self-control that allowed her to be such a successful architect.
Krieps and Montgomery are talented, charismatic actors, but the shortcomings of the screenplay let them down. For us to understand the malign hold Elizabeth has on Jill, both in the past and as a ghost, we need to viscerally see her presence in the changes that occur when she takes over the body of her son or her wife. There’s not a scene in which I got a glimpse of who this woman might have been. Krieps’ is the more effective performance, particularly when she is in the presence of the ghost. She conveys the wrenching combination of love and terror that is part of long-term abuse. Jack never really knew his mother, so when he is possessed he can do little more than scowl, reduced to imitating some imagined version of Heathcliff.
I was impressed by Van Grinsven’s previous film, Sequin in a Blue Room (2019), also co-written by Anast. That film had an equally bold visual aesthetic and I also liked its boldness in dealing with a queer coming-of-age story: it was the work of filmmakers unafraid of the complexity and danger of the erotic. Went Up the Hill lacks that daring. There is the suggestion that Jill might be masochistic, but that possibility is quickly abandoned once she and Jack have sex. You don’t need to be a Freudian to be aware of the provocation and threat of having a ghost play out her sexual fantasies using her son’s body, but Van Grinsven seems coyly reluctant to explore any dangerous ground. The sex scenes are depressingly tedious in this film. The actors don’t know who they are playing and so they are merely artfully arranged bodies under lights. There’s no longing, no fear, no curiosity.
As Helen, Sarah Peirse gives the outstanding performance in the film. She is magnificent in her strength and haughtiness. Helen’s purpose is also clearer than that for Jack and Jill: she is in no doubt about the evil she has glimpsed in her sister’s behaviour. It’s a devastatingly subtle performance. With a minimum of screen time, her face and the dignity and care of her gestures tell us all we need to know about the pain of grieving a family member whom you know was a monster.
The narrative’s loss of purpose is clear in its multiple endings. Having never succeeded in convincing us of Elizabeth’s reality, never having made her a real presence, Van Grinsven’s solution is to amplify the histrionics of the genre, the story continually returning to the icebound lake at the foot of the mountain. Again, these scenes recall Dreyer’s work and some of that glacial splendour recalls the exciting visual compositions of great silent cinema. Van Grinsven has talent, an astute visual imagination. Unfortunately, by this stage, I had completely lost interest in the story.
Van Grinsven clearly loves gothic and is attentive to its formal qualities. There’s a fairytale quality to the narrative, which is there in calling the main characters Jack and Jill, and in a visually elegant moment at the end where we finally glimpse green amid the ice and snow. The monster has been slain. This keenness for the power of fable is clear in his choices as a director, in the strength of the film’s technical achievements, in how it looks and how it sounds. It is the intrusion of the contemporary into the story that is the film’s undoing.
This failure is surprising. For those of us who love the fable and the fairytale, and who love the gothic ghost story, we know that those ageless stories still resonate, as does their subterranean, troubling eroticism. In fiction, writers such as Angela Carter and Anne Sexton have explored how the gothic tale and the fairytale can be reimagined and resurrected as feminist. And in cinema, from the excesses of giallo and Hammer horror to the exquisite reworkings of the fairytale by directors such as Walerian Borowczyk, the sexual subversiveness of the gothic form has long been celebrated.
It may be that the obligations that Van Grinsven and Anast feel to telling stories of trauma undermine their skills as storytellers. Went Up the Hill is too damn timid for a gothic ghost story. It’s sexless and it doesn’t scare us at all.
Went Up the Hill will be released nationally on September 11.
ARTS DIARY
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PHOTOGRAPHY Southern Nights: The Science & Beauty of Aurora Australis
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 16, 2025 as "Demonic grief".
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