Went Up the Hill Review: Possessed by Grief

Went Up the Hill is a visually haunting ghost story with strong performances, but its muddled script holds it back.

And while its hypnotic visuals and strong performances work to draw you in, the film often feels like it’s reaching for something profound that it never fully grasps. In the end, it’s a story about grief and memory that has atmosphere to spare, but not enough narrative clarity or emotional weight to land its most ambitious ideas.

The story follows Jack (Dacre Montgomery), a young man who travels to a remote New Zealand village for the funeral of his estranged mother. There, he meets Jill (Vicky Krieps, of The Dead Don’t Hurt), his mother’s widow, who is cold and enigmatic, wounded in ways we can’t fully read. But the reunion is hardly peaceful. The mother’s spirit begins to haunt the survivors, slipping in and out of their bodies like a parasite, initiating a disorienting, violent, and surreal psychological dance that blurs the lines between possession and grief.

Went Up the Hill is visually striking. The landscape is bleak and colorless, soaked in greys and blues, and the production design mirrors that spare, almost ghostly in its stillness. That lifeless, remote setting isn’t just a backdrop; it’s an extension of the film’s emotional state. This is a world hollowed out by loss, where people speak in whispers and ghosts don’t scream, they linger. There are long, quiet stretches where the camera just observes, letting the mood take over. You can feel the influence of The Others or even Under the Skin, films where tone is the main event.

Montgomery and Krieps are the anchors that hold the film together. Dacre, best known for Stranger Things, brings an emotional fragility to Jack that’s impressive, he plays grief not as an explosive outburst but as a silent ache. His eyes do most of the talking, constantly searching for something, comfort, meaning, closure, but never quite finding it. Krieps, meanwhile, gives Jill a deep interiority, as if she was constantly suppressing something unspeakable. When the two characters begin to exhibit the spirit’s influence, sometimes cruel, sometimes childlike, it’s their performances that make the transition believable. Both actors manage to play not just their characters, but versions of each other and of the haunting mother figure, often within the same scene. It’s tricky, layered work, and they pull it off.

For all the eerie stillness and inspired acting, the film’s script leaves a lot to be desired. Thematically, Went Up the Hill has fascinating ideas: grief as a kind of haunting, the way unresolved pain can take over your identity, how we inherit the trauma of those who leave us behind. But the screenplay feels too vague, too elusive to make these themes resonate in a meaningful way. Scenes drift by with poetic ambiguity, but rarely feel like they’re building toward something. Moments of possession are conceptually clever but emotionally distant. There’s a nursery-rhyme logic to the story, clearly inspired by “Jack and Jill”, but the allegory never quite clicks into place.

What’s most frustrating is how often the film seems to rely on its visual language to do the heavy lifting. Yes, the cinematography is haunting. Yes, the atmosphere is thick with dread. But without a firmer narrative spine or a deeper emotional connection, the film begins to feel hollow, like it’s more interested in looking profound than actually saying something profound. You’re left admiring the fog rather than feeling lost in it.

Still, there are flashes of brilliance in its conception, a ghost story where the dead literally take over the living in a shared emotional purgatory. And that core idea, however undercooked, lingers in the mind. You can feel the ambition behind Went Up the Hill, and that makes it more interesting than many horror films that play it safe. But ambition alone doesn’t make for an effective story, and by the time the film reaches its climax, you may find yourself more exhausted than haunted; I know I did.

Went Up the Hill will be released in US theatres on August 15, 2025.