‘Went Up the Hill’ Review: A Transfixing, Sensorial Ghost Story

Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterised by a starkly exact aesthetic and withholding strategy to the ghost story. Upon arriving at a funeral service for Elizabeth, a girl he claims was his mom, Jack (Dacre Montgomery) listens as the eulogist describes “Elizabeth’s personal creation” and notes that she’s survived by her spouse, Jill (Vicky Krieps). In a quiet alternate with Elizabeth’s sister (Sarah Peirse), Jack says that he was invited by Jill, just for Jill to disclaim understanding him in any respect. Moments later, she insists, “I would like him to remain.” It’s a reversal of feeling that’s emblematic of a movie the place disorientation is rife.

Elizabeth’s absence shapes the story as a lot as any residing character. Like the unseen first Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca, she’s a destabilizing power, collapsing the boundaries between the familial and the romantic. Jack’s boyfriend stays again dwelling, which lends an ambiguous high quality to later scenes of our essential characters in mattress. Are they themselves on this second, or are each being inhabited by Elizabeth? Along with possession and marital grief, the movie even hints at incest, with out hesitation and with out ever seeming as if desires to elicit our shock.

The movie’s tonal register isn’t precisely supple. Certainly, the similar aesthetic chilliness that lends Went Up the Hill its energy can devolve into monotony. However this can be a strikingly peculiar pastiche. The movie remembers the themes of Rebecca and the temporal displacements of Alain Resnais’s work (the ambient rating by Hanan Townshend’s even brings to thoughts the music of Sigur Rós), however its depiction of unusual intimacy below seemingly extraordinary circumstances is marked by a uniquely sensorial slow-burn fashion. By the finish, that Van Grinsven leaves the central mysteries unresolved feels much less like evasion than a deliberate, last act of withholding—one which’s very a lot of a chunk with the filmmaker’s memorably unyielding aesthetic of restraint.