Vicky Krieps Says Ghost Story Went Up the Hill Helped Her Overcome Loss

The cast and director of the haunting thriller “Went Up the Hill” say the film helped them overcome their own “personal ghost” on set, and that hopeful journey to healing is what ultimately made them sign on to be part of the project.

“When I received the script, I was mourning someone who died. I was very much living with a ghost — it felt like living with a ghost,” actress Vicky Krieps told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design. “I didn’t know how to get rid of it [or] move past it. I received the script, not only was it challenging to think that we could play three people as two actors, but also the ghost component as the way I read it, in a modern psychological sense.”

The “Phantom Thread” actress continued: “There has to be courage of actually fighting with it like in the film, when it comes to an actual survival fight, and they have to kill that ghost. I never thought of it that way. It’s almost necessary for it to be painful, for it to really burn away the old in order to be new. That’s what drew me to the script.”

Krieps stars in director Samuel Van Grinsven’s “Went Up the Hill,” an intimate ghost story centered on a young man named Jack (Dacre Montgomery) who travels to a remote area of New Zealand to attend his estranged mother’s funeral. While there he meets Jill, a grieving widow.

Van Grinsven said the film didn’t start off as a “ghost story,” and was actually inspired by a photograph.

“We all have our personal ghost that in some way, I think all three of us were collectively exploring throughout the making of this film,” he told TheWrap. “It started with a particular image of a coffin in the center of a room, a man and a woman on either side, both of them equally mourning for the person they’ve lost but knowing nothing about another.”

The other inspiration for the film, from which is derives its title, is the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill.”

“It’s really centered around the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill, but the connection for me with that is the idea that a nursery rhyme is passed down from mother to son, from generation to generation,” Grinsven explained. “And what we explore in this film is generational trauma, or cycles of abuse being passed down from mother to son, or from your parents to children.”

For Dacre Montgomery, who plays Jack in addition to pulling double duty with Krieps to portray Elizabeth, the actor said he too had a spooky experience filming, especially when the costars teamed up on the role.

“We both actually used a perfume to play Elizabeth so that we could identify when each one was in character by the smell in the room, and that was incredibly intoxicating,” Montgomery explained, adding that the feeling and scent was like a possessive force. “As a performer, that smell, I felt the darkest I’ve ever felt as a human. I felt like everything faded away. I felt sick. I don’t know how to describe it. It was oozing something that I’ve never experienced before. Something different, which can overtake you completely in the moment.”