Review of Starve Acre: a disturbing Yorkshire folk horror

Starve Acre begins with a quote, three stanzas titled “The Dandelion,” which invoke a mythical figure known variously as Jack, the Dandelion, or the Devil, who was banished—and cast down—by the townspeople. Heralding Jack's return from “the lap of nature” next spring, the poem casts a shadow over everything that follows. The quote may be a way to establish from the outset the literary origins of Starve Acre, which writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo adapted from Andrew Michael Hurley's 2019 novel of the same name; in the film, however, the quote is attributed to a certain Neil Willoughby, who will turn out to be Richard's (Matt Smith) late father.

Richard is an academic archaeologist dedicated to studying the past as a career, even if his long hair, openly criticised by ‘veteran’ colleagues, is symbolic of his more modern approach to the field (it’s the 1970s). He has buried his own past at Starve Acre, the bleak family estate where he was repeatedly subjected to Neil’s peculiar ritual abuse as a child – but Richard is drawn back to the remote estate with his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark), hoping the fresh air will do their asthmatic young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) good. Owen begins to respond in disturbing ways to what he describes as the whispers and whistles of ‘Jack Grey’, and his sudden death plunges Richard and Juliette into a deep hole of despair that soon intersects with local folklore.

“We must let him go,” Juliette tells Richard, and although she is referring specifically to a rabbit her husband has been secretly nursing in his upstairs office, her words reflect her feelings of losing Owen. The couple, like Jack in the opening poem, long to rise from the “cold abyss” of their grief and live and love each other again. As they try to process and overcome the death of a child, and their personal plight runs parallel to something more supernatural, they recall the Baxters in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973).

As Juliette watches Philip Saville's Hamlet in Elsinore (1964) on television while her sister Harrie (Erin Richards) is visiting, the face of Donald Sutherland, who plays Fortinbras, fills the screen as he speaks the final lines just before Juliette sees—or imagines she sees—the ghost of her son, just as Sutherland saw the ghost of his daughter in The Wicker Man. In 1973, Roeg's film was shown as a double bill with Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man. In Starve Acre, too, outsiders become part of a local ritual. Kokotajlo's first feature Apostasy (2017) dramatized the damage and dysfunction that uncompromising religious zeal can inflict on a family; here he takes these themes even further, digging deep into the cultish realms of folk horror.

Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) tracked the protagonist's mental disintegration in cutscenes to a rabbit that gradually decays and decomposes. Starve Acre does the opposite, depicting the reunification of a shattered family not only through a slow, seasonal change from the depths of winter to life-giving spring, but also through the miraculous, eerie transformation of unearthed bones into a living, breathing, fully corpulent, and undeniably sinister rabbit. But as Juliette resorts to unconventional remedies for her grief, and the less communicative Richard retreats into obsessive excavations around the property, their guilt and mutual recriminations gradually give rise to something mysterious and malevolent, requiring a sacrifice to fill the Willoughbys' emptiness.

Like Mary Lambert's Pet Sematary (1989), Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018), and Valdimar Jóhannsson's Lamb (2021), Starve Acre uses genre to explore the painful psychology of loss, but it is also deeply rooted in English folk traditions, even when, like the opening quote, these are partly or even entirely invented. What happens on the farm could be understood as a descent into madness, the shared nature of which symbolizes the couple's enduring, unconditional devotion to one another, or it could be their dazed participation in an ancient ritual of renewal that has been waiting for generations to sprout new shoots, fed by their grief. Either way, this slow-burn thriller, disquietingly scored by Matthew Herbert, unearths something primal and toxic at the roots of a once-and-perhaps-again happy family.

► Starve Acre is in United Kingdom Cinemas from September 6th.