Samuel Van Grinsven on honouring the weight of grief with his latest film Went Up the Hill

With two feature films under his belt, Samuel Van Grinsven has quickly become a vital voice in Australian cinema. His feature debut, the lurid and sumptuous 2019 queer drama Sequin in a Blue Room, utilised neon lights and lingering shots of yearning to amplify the sense of lead actor Conor Leach's youthful Sequin finding his place in a new, inviting world.

With his follow up feature, Went Up the Hill, Samuel, alongside regular co-writer Jory Anast, explores facets of grief through a gothic possession drama. Here we follow Jack (Dacre Montgomery) who returns home to New Zealand for the funeral of his mother. There, he forms a fractious bond with Jill (Vicky Krieps), the widow of his mother. Where Sequin in a Blue Room explored different shades of blue, from bright neons to dark navy's, Went Up the Hill immerses viewers in shades of grey, placing Jack and Jill in a brutalist style home overlooking a cold lake.

This is a film that's hard to shake. I first saw Went Up the Hill over a year ago now and there are moments in the film which have lingered in my mind in a way that that haunts my dreams. The pairing of Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps is a masterful one, with the two exploring emotionality in a way that we rarely get to see on screen in an Australian film. It is, ostensibly, a film about grief and the loss of someone in your life. For Jack, as an estranged son, he has grappled with processing that grief while his mother was alive, making her true passing feel like a new advent of grief and loss. For Jill, that grief is amplified by the arrival of Jack at her partners house, and what that means for her ability to mourn the loss of her partner. These aspects, and many more, are tenderly explored in the film.

In the following conversation, recorded ahead of the films screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Samuel talks about that colour palette for the film, while also exploring the creative path to exploring grief on screen.

At the end of this interview, I misquote the title of Max Porter's essential book about grief, his 2015 novella titled Grief is the Thing with Feathers. I want to read a quote from that book which I feel touches on what this film is about 'Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.'

Went Up the Hill arrives in Australian cinemas on 11 September. It is a film that demands a big screen viewing.

Read Nadine Whitney's review of Went Up the Hill here and listen to the interview with Dacre Montgomery here.

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