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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