If I had a nickel for every time a movie about ghosts starring a Stranger Things cast member played in theaters this weekend, I’d have two nickels — which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
There’s Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, of course. But don’t overlook a new film starring Dacre Montgomery, who played Billy Hargrove on the Netflix series, that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Directed by Samuel Van Grinsven, Went Up the Hill stars Montgomery as Jack, who “travels to a remote region of New Zealand to attend the wake of his estranged mother Elizabeth, a troubled architect who abandoned him as a child,” according to the TIFF plot summary. “Jack claims he was invited to the funeral by his mother’s widow, Jill, who has no recollection of contacting him.” Jill is played by Phantom Thread great Vicky Krieps, and she “invites Jack to stay at their house until the funeral, intrigued, as he is, for them to learn more about each other.”
Boy, did they ever learn about each other in what The Daily Beast called the “craziest sex scene of the year.”
The inability to move on means that both Jack and Jill are beholden to Elizabeth’s spirit, and they’re preyed upon throughout Went Up the Hill. This both frightens and enthralls them, and in terms of out-there perversity, it peaks early on, with Elizabeth inhabiting her son Jack in order to use his gay male body to make love to her lesbian spouse Jill. Set against a black backdrop and filmed in slow-motion, this bonkers coupling visually recalls Caravaggio, whereas a later panorama of Jack running across a nocturnal field of tall grass has a decidedly impressionistic quality.
It would be a weird coincidence if this also happened with the ghost of Bob in the final season of Stranger Things.
Went Up the Hill does not currently have a release date.