Grief is so often flattened into a single feeling that we recognize and then try to move past, as if sorrow were a box you tick and file away. It does not work like that. Anyone who has lived inside real mourning knows how uneven it is, how it rearranges time and memory. Someone once told me grief is like a concussion. The mind gets rattled by a blow it could not deflect and then it tries to protect itself. You slow down. Thoughts do not line up. You forget what you just did. You wonder why simple things suddenly feel heavy. It is not because you are weak. It is because you have been injured.
That idea sits at the heart of Went Up the Hill. Samuel Van Grinsven has made a ghost story that is not really about creaking doors and cold spots on the floor, although there are plenty of uncanny details. It is about two people who cannot outrun their losses, and a dead woman who seems eager to lie down beside them and remind them of what they cannot forget. The haunting here is not airy. It is corporeal. The past gets into bed. It slides into your posture and your stare. It borrows your skin until you are not quite yourself, and it refuses to respect any boundary that used to hold the world together.
Two strangers meet at a funeral. Jack arrives with the posture of someone who has had enough of being invisible. Jill stands in the role of a widow who thought she knew the contours of her life. The dead woman is Elizabeth, an artist. Jack is the son she left behind long ago. Jill is the wife Elizabeth built a life with later. Jill never knew there was a child. Jack says someone phoned him and said he should come, and he believes it was Jill. Jill says she never made the call. Right away there is a short sharp tear in the fabric of the day. Who summoned him. Who wanted this collision. It is a neat little mystery that hums underneath everything that follows.
The names are not subtle. They point to that old nursery rhyme about two innocents clambering up a hill on an errand that seems simple. A pail of water. A quick task. Then it turns into calamity. Jack falls and hurts his head. He is patched up with vinegar and brown paper. There is a line about Jill tumbling after, but then the rhyme turns away from her. She is left without a remedy in the text that every child learns. In the film, those echoes illuminate a lot about who these two are. The references are almost too on the nose, yet the story generates more disquiet from quieter sources, so the overt winks become a kind of nervous laugh that passes quickly.
The film opens with an image that feels like a thesis. Jack trudges up a hill toward a stone house. He does not sprint. He advances with the stubborn pace of someone who carries a weight, and the house at the top is not welcoming. Inside, the rooms feel severe and cold. Angles are bare and hard. The black clothes of the mourners gather into small knots. Faces lift, look, and then turn away. There is a whiff of devotion that has tipped into something else, as if these people have lost a figure who guided them and now must cling to one another to preserve the myth.
A woman breaks from the group and measures Jack in one pointed glance. This is Helen, Elizabeth’s sister, who registers his presence as a threat. She suggests rather bluntly that he leave. As she speaks you can sense a long history of protecting an image of Elizabeth that works for her. You can also sense the kind of family dynamic where certain subjects get sealed into boxes and labeled do not open. Jack is not a subject. He is the subject that blows the lid off everything. Meanwhile, Jill is first seen at a loom, pulling thread through the frame. It is a hard old trade. Her face looks drained, but the hands move. It tells you a lot about how she survives. She keeps her body busy while the loss sits just outside her skin.
The film does not linger over set up. After the funeral thinly separates day from night, Jack and Jill are left almost alone in the house. They circle each other with a mixture of suspicion and pull. Late that night Jack wakes and passes by a bedroom. Jill is sitting on the edge of the bed. She does not look like she did earlier. The change is not makeup or clothing. It is a new voltage. She seems charged with a purpose that is not hers. The next night the roles reverse. Jill wakes to Jack in a similar state. They come back to themselves in the morning with confusion and half formed memory. Jill puts words to what both of them feel. It is not us. She is here.
That she is Elizabeth. And yet nothing about the possession plays like a parlor trick. No one speaks in a voice that is not theirs. No heads swivel. No faces morph. When Elizabeth moves through them, it looks like an exaggeration of aspects already present. Grief does that. It presses on a tender spot until it becomes the whole person. You watch these two become larger than themselves and then collapse from the strain. It hurts to witness and it is compelling.
There is a sad fact in the background that Jill cannot accept. Elizabeth fell through the ice. But when her body was found, she had weighed herself down with stones in her pockets. That detail lands with a heavy cold thud. The echoes of Virginia Woolf are impossible to ignore, and the image fixes itself in your mind. For Jill, the idea that her wife chose to go under cuts deeper than she knows how to voice. It becomes an unsolvable riddle. Why was I not enough. Why did she leave me. Jack carries his own quiet earthquake. He was given up as a baby and passed from place to place. He learned to keep moving and also learned not to look too closely at pain he cannot use. His wounds are buried under a callus that he mistakes for strength. Elizabeth binds them both in a way that is not entirely supernatural. They tie themselves to the story of her and then the story refuses to release them.
The film’s look and sound do a lot of work. Cinematographer Tyson Perkins keeps the world muted, as if the color has been leached by winter and grief. The palette tends toward one family of tones, and it renders every surface a little colder. Frames hold for longer than you expect, and the composition encourages your eye to roam. Often one figure is near and sharp, and another hovers at the edge of the frame or dissolves into softness in the far corner. You start to look over shoulders. You begin to expect movement in the darker fields. Space loses its clear divisions. Inside and outside talk to each other.
Sound becomes almost another character. Robert Mackenzie layers the track with a kind of almost silence that is alive with small storm. Wind hums. A low thrumming noise sits beneath even the quietest scenes. Now and then there are sounds that might be the ice on a lake giving way. There are long moans that could be wind or could be voices pushed through a tunnel. The effect is not showy. It builds a feeling that nothing is still and nothing is solid. Even peace has an undertow.
This is only Van Grinsven’s second feature, and yet the grip on rhythm and image is sure. There is confidence in the way scenes hand you a question and then step away. There is patience in the way the camera refuses to flinch when a character seems about to break. The style is carefully constructed, yes, but it is in service of feeling. Without that grounding in human stakes, the technique would be an exercise. Here, it frames performances that give the film its heartbeat.
Vicky Krieps brings a complicated presence to Jill. She has always been an actor who can be playful and probing in the same breath. Here she turns inward. You see a woman whose inner life has closed its doors for now, who has become almost severe to survive. Yet there is steel and wit underneath. Jill has secrets that may not be malicious but are too tangled to untie easily. Krieps gives you the surface and lets you sense the movement below that surface. The performance never asks for pity. It asks to be watched closely.
Dacre Montgomery as Jack is a revelation for anyone who only knows him as the ferocious bully from that series set in the eighties. He made that character oddly touching by locating the hurt that powered the rage. He did it again in a small role as the television director in the music biopic where he wore sleek clothes and traded tough looks with the manager. In this film he opens himself up. Jack can be childlike and receptive one moment and then turn with a flash of something dangerous the next. He is charming in a way that makes you nervous. You feel protective of him and wary at the same time. Together, Krieps and Montgomery create a duet. They shift between tenderness and distrust with a fluency that feels lived in. One pushes and the other yields. Then the dynamic flips.
When Elizabeth presses into them, neither actor resorts to mimicry of a third person. The shift is smaller and maybe more unsettling. They do not feel replaced. They feel intensified. Elizabeth seems to heighten some trait inside them, to draw out a capacity for control or need or fury or longing that cannot be contained. It lands like a truth you wanted to keep quiet. The film understands that a possession that simply swaps in a new voice is less eerie than a possession that reveals what we already carry.
The raw mechanics of how all of this works are kept foggy. If you need rules and diagrams, you may find yourself scribbling on a mental napkin and hunting for a lever that you can pull to make the pieces fit. I had a couple of questions of that sort. They did not matter in the end. The film is after something that exists below logic, and it wins on that field. It is honest about the way sorrow behaves and it trusts the audience to live inside ambiguity for a while.
I kept thinking about the comparison to a head injury. After a concussion the world becomes too bright and too loud and too fast. You retreat. You nap at strange hours. Your brain hoards its energy like a cautious animal. The person in grief experiences a version of that. Memory goes fuzzy. Words slip. Time stretches to weird lengths. Went Up the Hill puts you in that state. It slows your breathing. It asks you to feel the room rather than scan it for plot. It makes haunting feel less like an external attack and more like an internal surge that takes you over.
The setting helps. The house at the top of the hill sits like a mind, with rooms you do not enter every day and corridors that turn at angles that confuse you. The climb to the front door is already a small trial. You arrive a little out of breath and a little guarded. The gatherings of mourners feel like memories that have come to sit for a while. They are dressed for grief in their black suits and dresses, but there is something a bit ceremonial about them, as if they have adopted the language and posture of admirers who want to enshrine a person rather than remember her fully. The moment Helen tries to shoo Jack away you can taste the fear that truth will unsettle the myth.
There is a chill beauty in the attention the film pays to work and ritual. Jill at her loom looks like a figure out of time. She pulls thread across thread to make something that holds together despite the tension. It is the perfect image for the way she lives. She makes a pattern from repeated motion while trying not to think about the moment the weaving might snap. Jack has his own rituals. He touches objects with a tenderness that suggests a deep hunger to belong to a place. A cup. A picture. A blanket. He makes a nest anywhere he goes. He also has a habit of turning away just when someone wants to know him. He holds himself in reserve, then flips and reveals more than you expect. The performances carry those small habits like secrets they forget to hide.
I do not want to reduce Elizabeth to an idea. She is the ghost, yes, and also a woman who made choices that ripple through everyone she touched. The rocks in the pockets will sit with me for a long time. The choice to sink speaks of a courage that is cruel to those left standing on the shore. It also speaks of a despair that craves control. The film does not judge her. It lets Jill and Jack wrestle with the version of her each one needs to believe in. A mentor. A monster. A mother who fled. A lover who chose the lake. Each portrait is unfinished. Each one changes as the nights go by.
The movie is clever about the way it uses the familiar rhyme as a low hum in the background. Jack and Jill went up the hill for water. It sounds so innocent. It sounds like a task a child could manage. That is what so many of us think grief will be. A chore, a climb, a pail, and back down again to tell the story. Instead someone trips. A crown is cut. A head gets wrapped. Jill tumbles too, and the rhyme forgets to tell us how she fared. In this story the answer is that she keeps moving, stiff and careful, with a private wound that no one thinks to bandage. It is not cruel. It is just how life often goes for the person who does not get the line in the song.
There are a few shots that capture that feeling so cleanly that I almost winced. One places Jack in sharp focus near the camera while Jill stands far back and fuzzy, almost a smudge of darker tone against a wall. You wait for her to move. You realize you are afraid to see what she will do. Another holds silence so long that your ears conjure noise. It is not actually silent at all. The air vibrates with something you cannot name. That is the world of someone in mourning. It looks still. It is not still.
What I admire most is that Went Up the Hill resists the urge to solve grief. It is not a puzzle to be finished. It is a landscape to be crossed and re crossed. The film allows for the possibility that some questions are not meant to be answered. Why did Elizabeth make the choice she did. Would a different conversation have turned her feet away from the water. What if Jack had met her as a teenager instead of as a grown man. The maybes will eat you alive if you feed them. Instead, the story reaches for acceptance, which is not the same thing as forgiveness and not the same thing as forgetting. Acceptance looks like two people who recognize that they carry a version of the dead inside them and then decide to walk with that presence rather than fight it every second.
If you go to this looking for a tidy ghost yarn, you might feel teased. The physics get blurry. The source of that phone call remains a whisper rather than a proclamation. But if you go ready to feel the ache of absence inside your ribs, you will find a film that speaks to you in a language that is not made up only of words. It is made up of glances and pauses and the way a room sounds when no one breathes for a few seconds.
There is a quiet bravery in letting a story be this spare and this direct about pain. It is easy to dress sorrow up in spectacle. It is harder to let it sit down and take up space. Van Grinsven trusts his actors and his audience, and Tyson Perkins and Robert Mackenzie craft an environment that lets that trust pay off. The result is a work that does not just talk about the subject. It embodies it. You come away with the sense that you have been held for a while by something that wanted your full attention. Something that pressed on your chest and then let go.
Grief is not tidy. It comes in waves. It borrows your face. It makes you feel slow and strange. This film understands that, and it gives form to that understanding without pretending to have a cure. When the last image fades, you may feel a little stunned. Not because you saw a trick or a twist. Because you recognized something true and hard, and the recognition itself is a kind of haunting.
Went Up the Hill is a ghost story, yes. It is also a portrait of two people trying to step forward while a hand from the past pulls at their sleeves. It is beautiful and unnerving and tender in a way that sneaks up on you. It stays. It lingers in the corners of the room when you turn off the lights. It lies down beside you and listens to your breath. And then, when you are ready, it lets you stand up and walk to the door.
