Having each taken leading roles in two of the splashiest, most expensive fantasy shows currently on air in the form of House of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark trade in swords and destinies and magical beasts for something far muckier and darker in Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre. A lo-fi, and very British, folk horror, it’s an effectively atmospheric trip that, both figuratively and literally, ends up just a little bit too grounded for its own good, not quite embracing the full freakout potential of its genre.
Based on the ‘70s Yorkshire-set novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, Smith and Clark play married couple Richard and Juliette, their mental state rocky from the opening sequence in which their little wrong’un of a young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) uses a sharp stick to blind a pony at the village fair. It seems to horrify Juliette more than Richard, whose own experiences of an awful father have made him into someone who seeks to love his own child deeply no matter what, but soon both their lives start collapsing after Owen dies of a catastrophic asthma attack. Juliette wants to find a way to move on, but Richard, who works as an archaeology professor, can’t yet, becoming obsessed with digging deep into the earth for the roots of an ancient chopped-down oak tree that Own always wanted to go looking for.
Of course, these roots hide something sinister – in this case a skeleton of a hare that, upon being dug up, begins to regenerate organs, skin, and hair, eventually coming back to life. A student of the Black Phillip School of Satanic Animals, this bunny seems to be the representative of a strange pagan figure called Dandelion Jack Grey, a mythical being that Richard’s dad, alongside eerie neighbour Gordon (Sean Gilder) used in scary stories to torment Richard as a kid.
It’s a slow walk to eventually get here in Starve Acre, and real scares are very few and far between (Juliette has some mild nightmares, and that’s about it for the first two-thirds or so of the film), but Kokotajlo does a great job of building an oppressive atmosphere. Richard and Juliette’s house always feels like a trapped space, and the ‘70s-aping cinematography brings a gritty life to proceedings. Smith and Clark are both solid as the bereaved parents, but given their creepy horror experience in things like Charlie Says and Saint Maud, you get the feeling that a little more could have been asked of them.
Star of the show is, almost inevitably, the hare. Sometimes a CG creation, other times an eerily lifelike animatronic, it’s remarkable piece of prop work/puppetry – you buy in pretty fully to the psychic hold it ends up exerting over the couple. With such a creepy centrepiece (and such a wonderfully shriek-y score/soundscape), it’s a shame, then, that the final descent into real pagan madness feels a little underpowered, especially in comparison with other recent Brit-horrors like Saint Maud, In the Earth, or His House (also starring Smith), Kokotajlo’s restraint actually slightly undoing him.
Starve Acre impresses in the way it nails down its subtleties – from performance to costuming to just how real any of this actually is – but I’d have liked it to push harder in its extremities. At its best, British folk horror really can make you feel like you’re some sort of accomplice to genuine insanity, but Starve Acre is just too tame to run far enough in that direction.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 