Latest addition to the British folk horror niche is Starve Acre a film with the sort of setting where the locals have webbed feet and a wife can also turn out to be your sister. But Starve Acre is not set in Norfolk instead this is early 1970s Yorkshire where parents Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette (Morfydd Clark) along with their young son move out of the big city to his late father’s cottage, the Starve Acres of the title, and where he grew up. Their rationale being that the healthy air, open spaces and friendly northerners will be a better atmosphere to raise their child than a metropolis of chocking smog, claustrophobic congestion and dodgy TV presenters. They soon find that it will be anything but the case when tragedy occurs.
Richard, an archaeologist, develops an obsession with excavating the roots of an old oak tree where he recovers the skeleton of a dead hare that starts to re-compose back to life via a combination of puppet work and CGI. It’s a slightly comic yet often disturbingly uneasy creature looking like the satanic offspring of Jim Henson’s workshop. Simultaneously the couple find that their neighbour Gordon (Sean Gilder) and his wife, are far from the benign neighbours they portray themselves.
Based on the book of the same name by Andrew Michael Hurley who co-writes the script here this is a pretty faithful adaptation right up to and including the books devastating last sentence. Co-written and directed by Daniel Kokotajlo there are nods to Equus, Don’t Look Now, Donni Darko and of course The Wicker Man but at the same time Starve Acre is very much its own thing. This is a slow burn story that draws you in to an ever more unsettling atmosphere with a well constructed jump scare early on. And Smith and Clark are perfectly cast in a film that often unsettles.
related feature : Noomi Rapace & director Valdimar Johannsson talk about the extraordinary folk horror thriller, ‘Lamb’
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Here’s the Starve Acre trailer….
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