You wait ages for a Yorkshire-set folk-horror dripping with grief and dread, and then two come along at once. First, there was The Moor, a melancholy, subtly supernatural tale of grief and dread set in motion by the death of a young boy; Starve Acre, however... well, same but it’s the ’70s and has bigger stars.
Arriving seven years after his gripping, thrillingly assured debut Apostasy, Daniel Kokotajlo’s second film is a valiant yet flawed adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s creepy 2019 novel about a grieving couple, Richard and Juliette, whose asthmatic, behaviourally troubled little boy has died suddenly, leaving them adrift in their remote home among the Yorkshire Dales. As they struggle to come to terms with the senseless tragedy, the couple – played here by Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark – begin to experience strange phenomena, which notebooks found in the house suggest may be linked to Richard’s childhood and his father’s belief in centuries-old folklore.
Wisely, if reductively, Kokotajlo’s screenplay rearranges the novel chronologically, but otherwise his fidelity to the source is impressive; the ‘tea-coloured Austin’ car described in the novel is precisely the correct shade of brown. For obvious reasons, the period setting is more noticeable in the film, but the immensely talented Smith and Clark bring the characters to life in a way that Hurley never quite managed. Smith’s face, seemingly hewn from one of the Yorkshire moors’ many standing stones, is a stark contrast to Clark’s avian features.
Both actors give tremendous performances, even when the going gets weird – as it inevitably will when, for instance, you’re raising a hare from the dead. The practical effects for this sequence are impressive – but then something calamitous happens, requiring a specific special effect that’s beyond the skill of the filmmakers.
Starve Acre leaves the moorlands and heads into the uncanny valley
The unfortunate effect of this is that Starve Acre leaves the moorlands and heads so far into the uncanny valley that it opens a B&B and offers regular tours. The suspension of disbelief required to walk the kind of tightrope required of a film of this kind of ‘elevated horror’ – the similarly-themed Lamb, for example – becomes increasingly difficult, throwing the third act into a downward spiral, more likely to provoke titters than terrors. For the final stretch, Starve Acre becomes almost indistinguishable from the kind of detail-oriented horror pastiches one might find on an episode of Inside No.9 – one inspired, perhaps, by the ‘Baby’ episode of Nigel Kneale’s 1976 anthology series Beasts, to which the source novel arguably owes a debt.
It’s far from a total failure, however, and although Kokotajlo doesn’t feel entirely at home in the horror genre, he is clearly a talent to be reckoned with. Perhaps he’s at his best when working – as he did with Apostasy – with more personal material.
In UK cinemas Sep 6.