In the old nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. In the Samuel Van Grinsven drama “Went Up the Hill,” characters named Jack and Jill have their own business on that hill, and it does involve water, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. (That said, the next lines of the old English nursery rhyme – “Jack fell down and broke his crown / And Jill came tumbling after” – do give you the sense that nobody comes out unscathed in any telling of this particular story).
The movie called “Went Up the Hill,” which had its world premiere on Thursday during the opening night of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, is a ghost story with roots in children’s doggerel, a tale of possession that runs on mood, not scares. The second feature from the New Zealand-born director Van Grinsven, the film is ferociously atmospheric, exquisitely creepy and languid to the point of obsession.
It’s spooky, to be sure, and full of often malignant spirits, but it steers well clear of any horror movie tropes. Instead, it’s a disquieting study of three damaged people played by two gifted actors who each get to play a character and a half.
In this case, Jack and Jill are Dacre Montgomery (“Stranger Things”) and Vicky Krieps (“The Phantom Thread,” “Corsage”). Jill is the widow of an artist named Elizabeth who has taken her own life by walking into a frigid lake with rocks in her pockets; Jack is her son from a previous relationship, little known by Jill or most others in Elizabeth’s life. They meet at a memorial service in Elizabeth’s dramatic hillside house, modern on the inside but blending into the mountain from the outside.
The story is told in bits and fragments, in teasing suggestions of past events and in dramatic images: Jill in the shower, water running down shoulder blades sharp enough to earn that word blades; characters reflected in the glass of a black-and-white etching hanging on the wall; ominous vistas of a frozen lake in the snowy environs of New Zealand’s South Island.
That remote landscape is a character of its own, due in large part to sound designer Robert Mackenzie. Throughout the film, the sounds of nature have an undercurrent of violence and menace, between the moaning of the wind and the rumblings of the mountains.
Within the relative refuge of the house, Jill sleeps in a mattress on the floor of the room that also contains Elizabeth’s coffin – and in the middle of the first night that she and Jack spend there, she gets up, goes to Jack and tells him that she’s his mother. “They took you from me,” says Jill-as-Elizabeth.
Krieps’ features, usually sharp and angular, have seemingly softened and rounded as she morphs into Elizabeth for the night. Then in the morning, she tells Jack that Elizabeth spoke to him through her, and “she has more to tell you tonight.”
But this isn’t so simple as Elizabeth possessing Jill to speak to her long-lost son every night. Elizabeth, it seems, also possesses Jack in order to speak to Jill, giving their interactions a shifting, evanescent dynamic as each actor shifts in and out of different characters and different roles within those characters.
The nightly possessions bring conflict but also shocking intimacy; when Jack and Jill, or whatever characters they happen to be at the moment, have sex, it plays out with almost architectural precision. Montgomery and Krieps do virtuoso jobs of sliding back and forth between Jack and Jill and various versions of Elizabeth – with everybody, alive or dead, looking for some kind of satisfaction or release that is nearly impossible to find.
During daylight hours, when Elizabeth isn’t making her appearances, Jack gets some information from his aunt, Helen (Sara Peirse), who talks of the abuse he suffered as a boy at the hands of Elizabeth. “Whatever you thought you would find here,” she says, “it doesn’t exist.”
Jill insists that there was love in these relationships, and that they can hang onto it, but things spiral into increasing shades of madness and mania – although while the film can get emotionally overwrought, it’s a curiously restrained style of overwrought, a spooky game of who’s who.
Along with the unsettling sounds of nature, Hanan Townshend’s music is long on voices delivering a breathy pulse, and an insistent itch that suggests that things are not OK. Tyson Perkins’ cinematography, meanwhile, is stunningly beautiful but also terrifying.
“Went Up the Hill” is passionate and dark but also stubbornly elusive and illusive; it may get its title from a plainspoken nursery rhyme, but this is a movie that takes place in the shadows, both visually and narratively.
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