A new Australian/New Zealand co-production that was made in New Zealand. All comments and collages by Johnny Moronic
Johnny’s remarks:
Went Up the Hill is a possession horror thriller when Jack (Dacre Montgomery) comes home for the funeral of the mother who gave him up. There’s a bit of tension with his arrival, particularly from his aunty Helen (Sarah Peirse), as he hasn’t been home since he was given up. Then he meets his mother’s partner Jill (Vicky Krieps) and a strange connection strikes up between them. At night Jill starts acting weird, seemingly possessed by the mother’s spirit. Jill wakes up without knowing what has happened but then as they go back to sleep, Jack becomes possessed by his mother and things get very weird. With each possession, the mother’s gives something for the both of them. For Jack, it’s finding out why his mother abandoned him and for Jill it’s one last taste of passion. But the mother’s old ways come back and she becomes malevolent towards the both of the them, causing harm both physically and emotionally and it soon becomes very dangerous for the both of them. A very strange, hard-to-pin-down movie that puts an interesting twist on the possession horror genre. It took quite a while for me to understand what was going on and it feels a bit incestuous before I realised that the mother was inhabiting both people. The movie is never not incredibly weird and does get quite ugly but this is a very intriguing entry into a fairly overstuffed genre. The movie does lay on thick ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’ theme although
Johnny Moronic’s film clips are here.