Starve Acre review – all tex­ture and no teeth

Back in 2017, direc­tor Daniel Koko­ta­j­lo was dubbed ​‘one to watch’ after his strik­ing debut Apos­ta­sy, a brood­ing dra­ma set with­in Manchester’s Jehovah’s Wit­ness com­mu­ni­ty. But those who watched were left wait­ing. Now, he returns with Starve Acre, which leaves behind the streets of Old­ham for the broad vis­tas of the York­shire Dales. As well as cross­ing the Pen­nines, Koko­ta­j­lo has crossed genre bor­ders, too: where Apos­ta­sy found dread and cru­el­ty in sufo­cat­ing dog­ma, Starve Acre works in a much more overt ​‘folk hor­ror’ vein.

Adapt­ed from the 2019 nov­el by Andrew Michael Hur­ley, the film focus­es on a cou­ple, archae­ol­o­gist Richard (Matt Smith, tasked with tack­ling a York­shire accent) and stay-at-home mum Juli­ette (Morfy­dd Clark, thank­ful­ly not), who move from inner- city Leeds to Richard’s rur­al child­hood home in search of some clean coun­try­side air to alle­vi­ate their son’s asth­ma. How­ev­er, super­sti­tion clings to the fields like the morn­ing fog, and there’s word of a mytho­log­i­cal being, Dan­de­lion Jack, lying in wait. Soon, tragedy, loss and long-buried trau­ma come to call, and after their son sud­den­ly dies, Richard and Juli­ette become whipped up by a cen­turies-old prophe­cy regard­ing Jack’s return.

On page and on screen, folk hor­ror is in bloom. Whether it’s Men or Enys Men, In the Earth or The Feast, direc­tors are turn­ing to the land­scape to pro­vide a dis­tinc­tive (and dis­tinc­tive­ly British) flour­ish to their films, find­ing some­thing weird, pri­mae­val and unset­tling in the depths of ancient forests, or just under the sur­face of this green and pleas­ant land. Starve Acre is an unde­ni­ably impres­sive addi­tion to this mini-move­ment, but it’s per­haps one that works bet­ter as a slow-burn­ing aes­thet­ic exer­cise than as either a nerve-rat­tling hor­ror or an exca­va­tion of nation­al myth, his­to­ry, or identity.

Tech­ni­cal­ly, it’s a stun­ner. Its 1970s set­ting allows cos­tume design­er Emma Fry­er to go wild in the knitwear depart­ment, while pro­duc­tion design­er Francesca Mas­sar­i­ol and art direc­tors Kather­ine Black and Amelia Lester-Hinch­life cap­ture a Britain at its most grim and sti­fling. Koko­ta­j­lo works again with Apos­ta­sy cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Adam Scarth to cast a fam­i­ly home as an emo­tion­al prison, always in shad­ow and half-dark­ness, as if all light has been ban­ished. The rare sun­light that does get in bleach­es the frame, cre­at­ing streaks of colour and halos around the image: appari­tions that feed into the film’s sense of a place haunt­ed and hound­ed by the past.

The film itself is in thrall to the past, too. There are par­al­lels with folk-hor­ror touch­stone The Wick­er Man, and the couple’s dia­bol­i­cal jour­ney and recur­rent run-ins with kind­ly neigh­bours-cum-cultists recalls Rosemary’s Baby. Like­wise, a glimpse of Don­ald Suther­land through the sta­t­ic of a TV set sug­gests an even deep­er link with Don’t Look Now, and its explo­ration of the over­lap between grief, obses­sion and the super­nat­ur­al. How­ev­er, apart from some splen­did effects work and a bravu­ra score from Matthew Her­bert, Kokotajlo’s film ulti­mate­ly comes up short. For all its com­po­sure and craft, Starve Acre sits in the shad­ow of what has come before.

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