Atmospheric barely begins to describe the vibe of Went Up the Hill, the Bergmanesque thriller-horror debut of New Zealand director Samuel Van Grinsban. He has created an eerie world within a world, where a vindictive ghost torments two people she wronged in life. Sternly committed to its vision, the film can feel like being trapped inside a dark secret, or inside a tormented mind.

At a sparsely attended funeral, an uninvited guest named Jack (Dacre Montgomery) is brusquely ordered to leave. A tense conversation reveals he is the estranged son of the deceased. The dead woman’s wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps), insists he stay. And stay he does, entering a volatile, dyadic relationship with Jill.

Except the rapport is not entirely insular. Their shared bond of pain is manipulated beyond the grave by the spirit of an angry woman who not only committed the ultimate act of self-harm but also damaged the two strangers who now face each other over her casket. Soon, the dead woman speaks nightly through Jack and Jill, driving them into encounters that feel charged and dangerous.

The setting for such an obsessive connection creates a bleak, hermetic—and highly designed—universe of its own. Jack and Jill stumble through an enormous, forbidding house decorated with stark artwork. Their faces loom in and out of the blackest shadows. The liquid-eyed Montgomery evokes a figure by Caravaggio; Krieps, a haunted Vermeer. Keening music, gasps, and thumps mirror the often-muffled verbal exchanges on the soundtrack.

The enveloping darkness and the baleful presence of trauma come to define the film. Overreliance on these artistic devices leaves dialogue that lands alternately bare or overly expository, without forward momentum. Jack and Jill are trapped deep in their mind-meld with the ghost, and at times it feels as if we are too. A refreshing blast of the outside world comes in through the door with the dead woman’s irascible sister (Sarah Peirse), who wants to know what the hell is going on with these two, and why Jack won’t stop hanging around.

We may be tempted to write the film off for becalming itself in spooky yet highfalutin eye candy. That is, until Van Grinsban stages a wrenching visual tour de force at the end, combining the power of action and horror. The scene delivers a sense of catharsis, of breaking through barriers. Went Up the Hill has its flaws, but it is the work of an ambitious talent.