Tuesday, August 19, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica
In this chilling ghost story, a recently deceased woman haunts her estranged son Jack (Dacre Montgomery of Stranger Things) and her grieving widow Jill (Vicky Krieps of Phantom Thread and Corsage). When the woman’s spirit inhabits the survivors, the living must grapple with the destruction she left behind while fighting for their own survival. A Toronto International Film Festival premiere. "A ghost story, but one shaped in a fresh and artful way by a director who, in his second film, already has the control of a master... Vicky Krieps and Dacre Montgomery are a captivating and haunted couple in Went Up the Hill. Actually haunted, as in possessed by a ghost. But Samuel Van Grinsven’s elliptical, poetic, technically stunning film is a ghost story that rarely does more than nod at horror tropes. The film pointedly uses that ghost as a means of exploring grief, abandonment and the emotional chaos the dead woman caused even while she was still alive. Van Grinsven was highly praised as a promising director for his first film, Sequin in a Blue Room (2019), made when he was still a film student. Went Up the Hill demonstrates that praise wasn’t misplaced." — The Hollywood Reporter "Went Up the Hill is an atmospheric film that finds its heart when displaying the best of Tyson Perkins’ ethereal cinematography and clever use of framing. His camerawork and style play to the film’s strengths, toying with the viewers’ paranoia and tightening the tension he’s helped to craft. Worth highlighting as well are the performances by the small yet powerful cast. Krieps and Montgomery create quite a curiously odd dynamic between one another’s characters as they form a strange bond and intimacy with each other. Throughout the film, both performers have to play two sides to their characters – their normal selves, and their 'possessed' selves when Elizabeth takes over – a challenging feat in and of itself." — Collider