Starve Acre: Matt Smith stars in a horror film that doesn’t quite take us to Hell
The horrors impending in Starve Acre first took root centuries ago, deep in the Yorkshire soil, when we imagine the Moors to have been more or less constantly enshrouded by mist.
Unearthing these secrets in a wintry 1970s setting might be a scientifically intriguing idea, but it’s not a particularly good one for the sanity of the film’s characters. The terrain between pagan folklore and psychodrama is turned over here by hand fork: it’s delicately developed as metaphor, but lacks the crazed tilt into shock it needs for major impact.
We follow an archaeologist called Richard (a surly Matt Smith) and his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark, the pale, interesting star of Saint Maud) as they respond to several devastating developments, starting at a country fair with the Equus-like psychosis of their five-year-old son Owen, who blinds a horse with a sharp stick.
Adapting the 2019 novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo, who made a bracing debut with the Jehovah’s Witness drama Apostasy, has nudged this only partway towards horror, framing it intelligently as a subdued and shivery landscape study.
Adam Scarth’s cinematography is the star of the show, with slow zooms that may put you in mind of The Wicker Man. The marital relationship has pronounced echoes of Don’t Look Now, too, and both the sound design and score (by cult DJ/producer/composer Matthew Herbert) throb with jangling dread.
Richard’s obsessive digging worsens with grief, and the couple stop speaking, at which point one truly uncanny thing transpires: the skeleton of a hare, found next to the stump of a once-mighty oak, starts reviving itself indoors. I faintly wondered if the film was going to go all Pet Sematary – the resurrection chiller Stephen King wrote early in his career and locked in a drawer, worrying he’d gone too far.
Starve Acre is not a failure, but the strength of the film is capped, mainly, by not going far enough. Smith and Clark do everything they reasonably can, and Sean Gilder is ideal as a solicitous neighbour, but supporting honours are stolen by Melanie Kilburn as an amusingly awkward medium, who says “ta-ra, love” straight after a disquieting seance, as if she’s just dropped off a fruit cake.
Disquiet, the film has in spades, and that certainly has its rewards: there’s something pure about a film’s scariest image being the mere charcoal drawing of a pagan deity, “Jack Grey”, and not anything that actually comes to life. Still, there’s a nagging feeling of unfulfilled potential – a risk horror runs in not going wild.
15 cert, 98 min. In cinemas from Friday September 6