2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
The solace of strangers
Relationships and healing were central for the director and star of a new film, they tell Weekend Mix film reviewer Amasio Jutel.
New Zealand-Australian director Samuel Van Grinsven transforms the familiar nursery rhyme Jack and Jill into a haunting ghost story in his New Zealand International Film Festival entry Went Up the Hill . Starring Stranger Things ' Dacre Montgomery and Phantom Thread 's Vicky Krieps in the Australian heartthrob's most personal role to date, this slow-burning, genre-bending tale explores the aftermath of loss and the eerie ways grief can possess us.
Set against the glowing winter scenery of Canterbury, Van Grinsven's Gothic quasi-adaptation unfolds as a tonally sombre, narratively fantastical chamber piece between two strangers who share a ghost. Jack (Montgomery), an estranged son, and Jill (Krieps), a grieving widow, meet for the first time at the funeral of Elizabeth, the woman they both thought they knew. But as they inhabit the cold, creaky house Elizabeth left behind, secrets unravel and something else begins to inhabit them both.
The two powerhouse performances at the film's centre compellingly anchor Van Grinsven's vision. Compositionally, he has a masterful grasp of tone, powerfully announcing his entry into the canon of New Zealand's cinema of unease. This dream-turned-nightmare supernatural tale is more Bergman than Blumhouse - less a conventional horror and more a psychological supernatural drama infused with the gothic sensibilities of nursery rhymes.
For Van Grinsven, there is something haunting about nursery rhymes.
"There's something about nursery rhymes that are both caring and cautionary. They're connected to the maternal, passed down from generation to generation and reinterpreted. That felt very connected to the idea of generational trauma, and how that is passed down, willingly or not, from parent to child. That, in itself, felt haunting," he says.
If Jack broke his crown, perhaps it wasn't a fall that did it. Maybe Jill did come tumbling down, just not in the way we were taught.
The film was shot on location at Canterbury's Flock Hill estate, nestled beside Lake Pearson; there couldn't be a more fitting environment in which to set this ethereal tale. The snow-blanketed Southern Alps loom over the estranged pair, isolated by their grief. Stretching into silence, the wintered highlands dampen any connection to the outside world - a cold and indifferent land, up the hill. Van Grinsven shoots the mountains, the snow and the shadows with precision, capturing the eerie locale as it lives in his mind.
"I wanted to capture New Zealand as I remembered it," Van Grinsven says, "as a child driving up and down with a sense of wide-eyed wonderment and being dwarfed by the landscape."
The painterly, desaturated aesthetic - whites, greys, browns, and blacks - pushes the visual language towards the Gothic. Van Grinsven and director of photography Tyson Perkins use light, shadow, reflection, and bisecting lines to mirror the characters' fractured identities and emotional states. Claustrophobic framing ensnares the viewer in Van Grinsven's trap, a compositional control he holds with a firm grip.
"The antagonist of the film is not on screen in a way that audiences are used to," Van Grinsven explains. "I had to bring her to life with every other tool in my toolkit, whether that's the control of the camera or an extremely severe control over colour palette."
Composer Hanan Townshend wrote the score before filming even began, helping shape the film's emotional tone. Lullaby-like, wordless vocalisations amplify the childlike longing Van Grinsven saw in the nursery rhyme. "That lulling effect that a nursery rhyme has on you in real life is what I wanted to capture," he explains. "That you almost feel hypnotised by it."
The resulting tone is sombre and dreamlike, finely tuned, precise, and eerie.
The tonal unease - somewhere between horror, fantasy, and drama - was achieved by layering genres. Van Grinsven drew inspiration from Persona -era Ingmar Bergman. He describes it as "the strange tension point when you put two genres together that aren't meant to go together, or don't conventionally go together".
The cold and creaky house at the centre of his film, perched like a secret among the hills, was in the world of the film designed by the recently deceased Elizabeth.
Young star Montgomery calls it "the third character".
"Every single element and layer of the onion that is this beautiful film is influenced by Flock Hill estate. We were living on one side of the house and performing on the other side. It was intrinsically in our bones and our DNA by the end of the film. You couldn't escape it. It's everything," Montgomery says.
"It's the archetype of the haunted house, but in a purely naturalistic way, connected to the landscape in New Zealand. She built in this location for a reason," Van Grinsven adds.
It shapes the film's oppressive mood and echoes the characters' emotional imprisonment, eloquently portrayed by Montgomery and Krieps.
"We were all Shelly Duvall in The Shining at one point," Montgomery jokes.
Jack is fragile, consumed by a longing for maternal connection; Jill's identity, like Jack's, is deeply entangled with Elizabeth. He is searching for a mother he never had; she is mourning a partner she never truly knew. Together, they engage in this poetic "psychic ballet" - to coin Van Grinsven - creating Elizabeth in each other's bodies: Jack as Jill's wife, Jill as Jack's mother. In doing so, they search for what they believe is closure, but it's what ultimately keeps them trapped in grief.
"There's always this unearned intimacy between the two of them; this unease where they are for a portion of the film, using each other as a means to an end, but gradually grow to care about each other," Van Grinsven says. "There was something quite beautiful about the way Vicky and Dacre kept up the energy - that palpable kind of tension that only comes from two strangers."
Taking a leaf out of Phantom Thread co-star Daniel Day-Lewis' book, Krieps never socialised with Montgomery off-set.
"We have the most intense chemistry of anyone I've ever worked with, but we never spoke to each other," Montgomery says. "I feel like I had this weird old soul bond with Vicky that we didn't need to get into."
As much as this ghost story wasn't a horror film, it was certainly an exorcism for Montgomery, who describes his time on the film as a deeply personal journey of self-reckoning.
"From the year of rehearsal we did and the further year and a-half it took me to let go of the character before we premiered at Toronto, I didn't do anything except live Went Up the Hill for two and a-half years of my life."
The role demanded more than just performance. Montgomery stripped away his own defences to inhabit not just Jack's grief, but his own.
"Using art to try to heal oneself is incredibly revealing. You become very self-conscious of your performance, your being, how your body looks, and how you feel. That was a challenge I overcame in this film: letting go of that and allowing myself to be a child and to be vulnerable as Dacre. I felt I was able to overcome that in some parts, and in others, it was truly a wall I couldn't break through.
"Jack may be the only character I ever play that is truly almost, in so many ways, me."
Went Up the Hill casts complex queer characters in a story archetype that traditionally invites conventional narrative expectations, a fact that informs the subtle power dynamics and emotional distance between its leads.
"I was excited by the core relationship in the film being a queer woman and a queer man," Van Grinsven says. "If they were both to be heterosexual, the baggage that an audience brings to a film about possession and ghostliness would be that they're going to form a romantic connection. By queering that expectation, it opens audiences up to a more honest and raw exploration of what the film's dealing with."
The film also continues themes Van Grinsven explored in his debut, Sequin in a Blue Room .
"It was exciting for me, being able to grapple with things that I see in real relationships around me, real queer relationships around me, and bring that to the screen in a way they're not often represented.
"I think queer cinema is changing so much. I think for the first time, we're seeing queer cinema being approached as commercially viable. There's a real appetite coming from audiences, which is fantastic."
• Went Up the Hill screens as part of Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival at Rialto, Thursday, August 21, 6pm.
