‘Starve Acre’ London Film Festival 2023 Review: An Authentically 1970s Folk Horror That Doesn’t Do Enough To Stand Out
The English eerie is in resurgence. Led by the likes of Ben Myers, Jenn Ashworth, and Kerry Andrew, authors are peeling back the skin of England’s pastoral landscapes to expose the bones beneath. It was only a matter of time before such grisly literature crawled onto the screen. Now, fresh from Shane Meadows’ recent TV adaptation of The Gallows Pole, Myers’ breakthrough 2017 novel, comes another strange tale caked in Yorkshire mud.
Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo, Starve Acre is based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Andrew Michael Hurley, who since his debut The Loney has proven himself a master of the modern gothic.
The film is set in the 1970s. Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark play Richard and Juliette Willoughby, who together with their six-year-old son Owen have recently relocated from the city to Richard’s childhood home, a farmstead named Starve Acre deep in the Yorkshire Dales. Rurality is fundamental to folk horror. The countryside supposedly offers a place of hope and renewal. The Dales’ stepped valleys, though, carved by glaciers and beset by near-constant rain, make for an environment that offers little in the way of comfort.
Director of photography Adam Scarth paints in a typically Yorkshire, typically 1970s palette, which is to say that every color is brown, while wide-angle lenses are used to distort the terrain, suggesting something bigger than the characters is at play here. Richard is an archeologist. Over the course of the film, his excavations confirm those suspicions.
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After Owen begins exhibiting unusual behavior and talking in his sleep, a tragedy plunges Richard and Juliette into a period of mourning. Juliette turns to the community for comfort, while Richard turns to his shovel. So begins a long winter starved of affection. No matter. Spring is coming.
A central motif of folk horror is recurrent beliefs, ideas, or events; the present is haunted by the past. As Richard digs into his own, he unearths the skeleton of a hare, a symbol of rebirth. That symbol becomes rather more literal when the Lepus starts regenerating its tissue and hopping around the house.
Kokotajlo cites the 1988 surrealist fantasy Alice as an influence here. Inspired by the film’s White Rabbit, rendered in chattering stop-motion, Kokotajlo sought to lend a similarly off-kilter vibe to his own creature character. Though not as ratty and manic as Alice’s White Rabbit, Starve Acre’s animatronic puppet hare brings an uncanny energy to proceedings that a real animal could not.
The Willoughby history lingers ever heavier as Richard uncovers the roots of an ancient and supposedly mystical oak tree, with creeping tendrils that hint at its influence. Meanwhile, Juliette finds peace as the hare becomes a surrogate child to the couple and the film twists itself into a crooked love story about grief and the inescapable horror of family.
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Kokotajlo is more direct with his mythology than Hurley is on the page, building upon the author’s abstract outlines to better visualize his film’s threats and make his scares more palpable. With its period details and piss-wet costumes, Starve Acre feels like an artifact buried in 1973 and only recently dug up. It’s an authentic folk horror that calls to mind not just Doctor Who through the casting of Smith but also BBC films directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and teleplays written by Nigel Kneale.
Still, Starve Acre is too staid. In the midst of a folk horror movement that is by now not just a “revival” but a fully-fledged second coming and has recently given us such divergent works as Hellbender and Enys Men, being a 1970s facsimile—even a good one—is no longer enough. Many will wish Starve Acre strayed further into supernatural territory. For all the director’s intent to better visualize the novel’s frights, though, the film’s most exciting threats are never brought to bear. Kokotajlo and Co. needed to dig deeper.
Summary
‘Starve Acre’ is a beautiful facsimile of 1970s folk horror, but never goes far enough to make it stand apart from better contemporary folk horror offerings.
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