Producers: Vicky Pope, Samantha Jennings and Kristina Ceyton    Director: Samuel Van Grinsven   Screenplay: Samuel Van Grinsven and Jory Anast   Cast: Vicky Krieps, Dacre Montgomery, Sarah Peirse, Arlo Green, Joel Tobeck and Finlay Grey   Distributor: Greenwich Entertainment

Grade: C

Samuel Van Grinsven’s “Went Up the Hill” definitely creates a distinctive mood—a bleak, creepy one, which emphasizes the darker aspects of the nursery rhyme that provides its title.  But whether you’ll want to spend two hours in the company of the couple trapped in it—a young man named Jack and his grieving stepmother Jill—is extremely doubtful.

The film is a ghost story, but a very unconventional one.  It begins with Jack (Dacre Montgomery) slowly climbing the hill at the foot of a New Zealand mountain range to the modernist house designed by renowned architect Elizabeth, the recently deceased mother he’s never known.  He’s received with hostility by Elizabeth’s sister Helen (Sarah Peirse), but the dead woman’s widow Jill (Vicky Krieps), whom he claims invited him to the wake though she doesn’t remember doing so, insists he should stay.  He’s shown to a room in the chilly, shadow-drenched wood-and-concrete mansion; she’s sleeping beside the black stone coffin that dominates the gloomy parlor.

Then the supernatural element arrives.  Elizabeth is dead—a suicide, we learn, having filled her pockets with stones before walking onto a frozen lake and crashing through the ice—but not gone.  In nocturnal visits she possesses first Jill and then Jack, who, at the urging of the possessed Jill, has left behind his significant other Ben (Arlo Green, heard only in tense phone exchanges) to mourn his mother.  Her purpose is to bend both of them to her will, which, in what’s the film’s most erotic but unnerving sequence, means inhabiting the gay Jack and using him as her instrument to have post-mortem sex with her lesbian wife—a coupling the camera lingers over, in steamy slow motion, at inordinate length. 

But Elizabeth is also intent on abusing her victims.  In fact, that’s always been a salient element of her personality: it’s eventually revealed that Helen had young Jack (Finlay Grey) taken from her sister by charging her with mistreating the boy (apparently, if the flashbacks are to be believed, by locking him in a streaming shower stall), and Jill has bruises that indicate Elizabeth has injured her as well.  And her designs for what will happen to them when they go to the lake to scatter her ashes are not those of a loving wife and mother.

Jack and Jill are, it appears, as determined to submit as Elizabeth is to dominate.  They spend much of their time looking at one another anxiously, waiting for the next time they will fall asleep and become the ghost’s tools.  Their longing is as inescapable as hers until it dawns on them what she intends, which seems to be an ever-enduring threesome.

“Went Up the Hill” is quite stunning to behold.  The landscape is incredible, and it, as well as the brooding gray house exquisitely shaped by production designer Sherree Philips are beautifully captured by cinematographer Tyson Perkins.  Of equal importance is the ominous score by Hanan Townshend and the sound design by Robert Mackenzie, which makes the moans, shrieks and whispers part of the ambience in a quite striking way.

And yet as staged with grim determination by Van Grinsven and edited by Dany Cooper, the film is so slow and mannered that it doesn’t take long for the parable of trauma, loneliness, grief and desire to descend into something very near self-parody.  Though both Krieps and Montgomery invest completely in their roles and carefully differentiate between the time as themselves and the episodes of possession, eventually their furtive glances and pained expressions grow increasingly tedious.  This is, after all, despite its peculiarity, quite a simple tale, and one that feels very much dragged out in this turgid telling.  Moreover, casting it as a gloomy version of a nursery rhyme, with some on-the-nose allusions clumsily attached, doesn’t help matters.

In the end “Went Up the Hill” resembles an artwork you see in a museum that’s impressive from a distance but that you don’t want to get too close to.  It’s not grisly, but it makes you feel queasy and repelled.  Maybe that’s the result Van Grinsven wanted to achieve.  But it’s not much of an invitation for a viewer looking for a few contented squeals when a ghost goes “Boo!”  Its appeal is more suited to those wanting to wade into the waters of psychological perversity.